Why an anglerfish's viral moment has us all swimming in our feelings
Marine experts have no idea what made the anglerfish go on a seemingly suicidal journey to the surface. But that hasn't stopped netizens from creating their own heart-breaking stories.
The viral anglerfish video (right) and the short film it inspired. (Screen grabs: TikTok/drew_j_garcia and Instagram/jara.natura)
This audio is generated by an AI tool.
By now, your algorithm would have floated up the viral video of an anglerfish that has inspired tear-jerking poems, cartoons, songs and even tattoos.
The fish itself looked like the stuff of nightmares though: A swimming mouth crammed full of needle-like teeth and eyes as lifeless as the ikan kuning on your nasi lemak. Hardly the stuff that tugs at your heartstrings.
Not to some netizens who have chosen to look past its appearance and embrace, well, the fish within. What existential crisis inspired this black sea devil anglerfish, a creature of the deep, to swim up to the surface on that fateful day of Jan 26?
For an animal that has adapted to the crushing pressure of the abyss, doing so would surely unalive it – which was what happened a few hours later, according to marine wildlife photographer David Jara Boguna, who took the video.
He had spotted it about 2km off the coast of Tenerife, the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands, while researching on sharks with the NGO Condrik Tenefe.
NAVIGATING THE EMOTIONAL SEASCAPE
If you're thinking, was the photographer in any danger videoing the anglerfish, it was just 6cm long – hardly the monster you'd imagine. And it appeared more disoriented than anything, according to Boguna.
We will never know what drove the little sea devil to make the one-way trip. Was it injury or disease? Or did it want to escape its life of darkness?
Some very emotional netizens seemed to think so. “She finally saw a light she didn’t have to make,” sobbed TikTok user @chronic.kaleigh, referring to the anglerfish’s bioluminescent lure.
“Look how tiny she was and she swam that great distance,” she bawled in her clip. “She just swam all that way on her own and I’m just picturing her swimming up and up and up. And she was so little. And she did that all on her own.”
Others, such as LA-based film director Drew Garcia, put together a Pixar-worthy short based on what he thought might have caused the anglerfish to make that one final swim. Cue the tissues.
Tattoo artist and TikTok user @ameratattoo captioned a post of her new anglerfish tattoo with: “For my last day I think I’ll go see the sun”.
Over on Instagram, poet Jayli Wolf waxed lyrical about the anglerfish “following her own light through the darkest of places all her life”.
WEIRD ANGLERFISH FACTS
The dramatisation on social media aside, marine experts are also intrigued by the sighting.
“When I first saw the video, I honestly didn’t believe what I was seeing,” said fish biologist Kory Evans from Rice University in Texas. “I thought it was AI,” he said on National Geographic.
As it turns out, there are more bizarre facts about the little anglerfish that kept swimming, to paraphrase Dory.
It is unusual to see black sea devil anglerfish swim up
It is so rare that only one other person – Professor Bruce Robison, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute – has footage of a live sea devil. And even so, it was shot at a depth of 580m.
“Their whole deal is not moving,” said Prof Robison on National Geographic. “They are ambush predators,” he said. “They kind of sit there, bobbing around, so seeing this one doing something active is kind of shocking.”
Another reason why you don't see them: Deep-sea species such as the black sea devil anglerfish are typically found at depths between 200m and 2,000m.
It was indeed a “she”
How did netizens know that the anglerfish was female? One sign is the lure on its head; in many species of anglerfish, only the females have it.
Also, the males are a lot smaller than the females, typically a fraction of the size of females, according to Natural History Museum.
Fishing for food with bacteria-fuelled light
Different species of anglerfish vary in size and shape but the females all lure prey towards them with their fishing rod-like appendages, according to Monterey Bay Aquarium.
The deep-sea species often have a sac of bioluminescent bacteria called the esca at the end of the rod. It glows in the dark and it’s what attracts prey towards the anglerfish’s waiting mouth.
Other species, such as the frogfish, for instance, have lures that resemble worms to target small, hungry fish instead.
Male anglerfish become part of the female to reproduce
In the barren, unforgiving waters of the deep, where food is scarce and sexual partners are even scarcer, some male anglerfish have evolved a solution: Fuse with the female.
According to Discover Magazine, once the male “sniffs” out a female, he swims to her, bites into her skin and hangs on for life quite literally.
Over time, his circulatory system merges with hers, letting him provide sperm on demand while he receives nutrients from her body. Basically, he becomes a living sperm sac hanging off her body. Sometimes, several males can attach to the same female.
There are over 200 species of anglerfish – and they all look bizarre
Other than the black sea devil anglerfish, other deep-sea species of anglerfish include the football anglerfish and Paxton's whipnose.
Even their shallow-water cousins such as the frogfish, sea toad and the edible monkfish, which is enjoyed for its lobster-like meat, look out of this world.
Just how bizarre? The red-lipped batfish, for instance, looks exactly like what you’d imagine:
