A rare fish with a transparent head was photographed in “Twilight of the Sea”

The encounter with the fish took place by a remote control car of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The fish, which has the scientific name ‘macropinna microstoma’, shows itself rarely: In 5,600 missions with the vehicles, which yielded more than 27,000 hours of video material, the sky viewer with its stunning transparent head has been spotted just nine times.

look at the sky

The sky viewer got its name because it looks up in search of prey. These are usually small crustaceans. But the mouth is pointing forward, which baffles scientists: how does the fish eat? It now appears that the eyes can rotate in the transparent head.

The research institute put these images online:

Also the British newspaper Watchman He writes about the rare fish that lives “in the twilight of the sea”, that is, on the border where the light turns into complete darkness. Not only can Rajah’s emerald green eyes rotate in the sky, they are also extremely sensitive to light, allowing them to chase prey.

15 cm

The length of the fish can reach about 15 cm. From below it is almost invisible to other fish. At the same time, it has an advantage over the fish that swim above it: it often has a blue glowing belly to mimic sunlight on the water, protecting it from attacks from below, but sky-watchers can see the difference.

“It has always been a mystery to me why their eyes are so high,” one of the researchers told the British newspaper. But moving images of sky scenes, made with cameras that can produce extremely sharp images, solved that problem. “So that they can rotate their eyes to follow the food falling from above until it lands in front of their mouths.”

food thief

So is the transparent cover – “like the cockpit of a fighter plane” – the researchers had never seen before. These were missing from all dead specimens found earlier. Scientists believe that this is possible to protect the eyes from the poisonous tentacles of jellyfish. The sky viewer ‘steals’ food from jellyfish: he chases after the sticky sea dwellers and then nibbles on small bites of crustaceans that stick to the tentacles.