For a while there, we had a series called Crazy Creature of the Week. It had nothing to do with surfing, which is good, because there are very cool things in the world that aren’t surfing. I don’t know why we stopped doing it, but we did. Chalk it up to laziness, because Lord knows there’s no shortage of crazy creatures in the ocean… and the Macropinna microstoma is certainly one of them. It’s a fish with a see through head.
The tiny little creature measures around six inches, and like many of the weirdest animals on the planet, lives in the deep sea. Very deep, in fact: around 2000 feet. Because of the depth it calls home, it wasn’t discovered until the late ’30s. Even then, the see through head wasn’t noticed. Not because it was see through, but because it was destroyed when being pulled up in fishing nets.
As strange as having a clear head might be, that’s not the strangest part about the Macropinna microstoma. See those glowing green lobes that you’d assume are part of the brain? Those are actually the lenses of its eyes. The things that look like eyes on the outside of its head are actually nostrils.
The Macropinna microstoma is part of a family of fish called barreleyes, named for the shape of the their eyes. Because they live in the dark, they’ve developed tubular-shaped seeing organs that are extraordinarily good at picking up the tiniest amount of sunlight that filters down through 2000 feet of water. For a long time, researchers believed that the eyes remained in a fixed position, looking straight up at the surface for potential prey. Now though, after the Monterey Bay Aquarium recently used remotely operated submarines off Central California, they’ve found that the eyes actually move around inside its jelly-filled head, moving from vertical to horizontal.
While scientist still aren’t exactly sure why the fish evolved to have eyes on the inside of its head, they’ve made a few suppositions after looking at the contents of its stomach. The Macropinna microstoma lives among colonies of siphonophores, a creature that is extraordinarily weird in its own right. Siphonopheres have long, stinging tentacles that collect food that the Macropinna eats. With its eyes protected by the head, it would be able to scavenge food from the tentacles while keeping those eyes sting-free.
For more of those old Crazy Creatures of the Week, check out this cat-eating crab, this freakishly big pill-bug, this massive sea booger, this piece of living, rubbery flesh, and the most disgusting thing you’ve ever seen.
