[intro] [sad noises] jessi: oh hey, guys! we were just practicingour sad faces. ooo, good one, squeaks! chances are you can’t look any more miserablethan this deep-sea creature: meet the blobfish!
sea snake facts and information, it’s got a pretty good reason to look sobummed. it’s been called the world’s ugliest animal. which really isn’t a nice thing to say. i mean, it might not be as cute as a pandaor a kitten, but the blobfish’s funny-looking
body actually helps it to survive in its harshunderwater environment. the blobfish lives in the ocean off the coastof australia. and it lives really, really deep. how deep? almost at the sea floor -- that’snearly 10 times deeper than where most ocean animals live. not many animals could survive where the blobfishlives. down there, it’s pitch-black because sunlightcan’t even reach that far; the temperature is just a few degrees above freezing; andthe pressure is extremely high. so what’s this pressure we’re talkingabout? well, if you’re at the bottom of
the ocean, the weight of alllll the wateron top of you presses down really hard. and it squeezes you -- like a really, really tightbear hug! so how does the blobfish survive with allthis intense pressure? well, that’s where its “ugliness†is actually a plus! the blobfish has a gooey, jelly-like bodythat can handle the squeezing from all of that underwater pressure. in fact, it has almost no muscle, and veryfew bones. it’s almost pure squish! but it’s still able to do things like moveand eat, because its blobbiness makes it buoyant. and this means it can just float comfortablyright above the ocean floor without having
to use too much energy to swim. and it mostly just swallows food that happensto float on by. which i have to admit would be pretty neat.could you imagine cheeseburgers just floating into your mouth?! so the blobfish is blobby for a lot of goodreasons. and to its underwater friends, it probably doesn’t look so ugly at all. scientists actually think that -- when it’sat home on the ocean floor -- the blobfish probably looks more like the other fish thatwe know. that’s because the pressure at the bottom of the ocean squeezes its bodyinto that shape.
but most of the blobfish that we've seen havebeen caught by fishing nets, and brought up out of the ocean. and when a blobfish is taken away from thepressure that gives its body that shape, well, it looks blobbier than usual.
so is the blobfish really ugly? well, maybeto some people. is it awesome? definitely. thanks for learning about the blobfish withme and squeaks. we’re going to go ahead and practice our silly faces now, hope youguys do too.
