Roman Fedortsov, a Russian fisherman, shared a video of a strange-looking fish he pulled from the depths, sparking quite a bit of curiosity among social media users.
The specimen Fedortsov placed at the edge of his boat looked like a bloated, slimy gray blob.
However, what stunned observers the most was its peculiar face, which many likened to an alien—one that didn’t seem particularly happy to visit our planet.
People quickly compared it to characters like Megamind, Krang from the Ninja Turtles, and even the aliens from Mars Attacks.
“Are you chopping aliens’ heads for views?” one user joked.
“I always knew they were somewhere around,” someone else commented.
“It has a bigger brain than some people I know,” a third user chimed in, while another requested, “Ok, we saw it, now put it back.”
Fisherman Roman Fedortsov shared one of his strangest catches with his 615,000 Instagram followers
Image credits: Roberta Sant’Anna/Unsplash (Not the actual photo)
“My morning face,” a separate user quipped.
The unique creature is a smooth lumpsucker, also known as a smooth lumpfish.
“These fish are usually found in midwater depths of the North Pacific Ocean and are not often encountered,” Dr. Todd Clardy, Collection Manager of Ichthyology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, explained to Bored Panda.
“They do come close to shore from December through June to reproduce. We are at about the midpoint of their spawning season, so perhaps that is why the fish was captured.”
Fedortsov caught an unusually swollen smooth lumpsucker
Image credits: Глеб Колесников / GBIF (Not the actual photo)
These fish are so rare that the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, which tracks the conservation status of thousands of organisms, has not yet evaluated the species, Aptocyclus ventricosus.
“That generally means that so little is known about the species that it is not possible to evaluate its conservation status.”
Smooth lumpsuckers have a high water content in their tissues and round, bulbous bodies. As Dr. Clardy explained, this is a characteristic of Cyclopteridae, the family of fish to which their species belongs.
Image credits: rfedortsov_official_account
Though they’re not the best swimmers in the Pacific, they have a pelvic sucking disc that helps them survive after birth.
“This is where elements of the pelvic fin are fused in a way to form a suction cup.
“Although the adults swim around in the open water, the young live in intertidal areas where wave action can be strong. They can stick themselves to rocks with this sucking disc and stay in place in rough surf.”
Many netizens said the specimen looked straight out of a sci-fi film
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But what about the viral fish’s extremely swollen appearance? The high water content in its body does not explain its uniquely bloated look, the expert said.
Nor does barotrauma, a condition in which a fish’s swim bladder expands due to pressure differences when being rapidly brought to the surface.
“When their swim bladder expands rapidly, fish can often puff up unnaturally and look very strange.
“However, this is not the case for this fish because Aptocyclus ventricosus does not have a swim bladder. There is no swim bladder to puff up!
“I assume this is just how a large, freshly caught Aptocyclus ventricosus looks, which is pretty cool to me!”
Smooth lumpsuckers live in the North Pacific Ocean and are not often encountered
Image credits: Sarah Lee / Unsplash (Not the actual photo)
Image credits: GBIF / OpenStreetMap
Dr. Mark Sabaj, Collection Manager of Fishes at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, offers a different theory. He suggests that the fish’s unusually swollen appearance may be due to something it ate.
“This particular one may have just eaten something large (like a jellyfish), and its entire body (including a belly full of jellyfish) bloated after being removed from the pressure of the ocean depths,” he told Bored Panda.
This fish’s adult maximum size is around 40 cm (15 in)
Image credits: Alexander Shienok / GBIF (Not the actual photo)
As Dr. Sabaj shared, smooth lumpsuckers are an important part of the food chain since they’re food for Steller’s sea lions, seals, and other marine mammals.
“Although its flesh is edible, it is not typically eaten by people, except for those looking for an exotic meal,” he said, adding that natives of the Commander Islands fed these fish to their dogs.
Dr. Todd Clardy shared a photo of the specimen from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County to show how different they look from the fresh specimen Fedortsov caught
Image credits: Dr. Todd Clardy/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
According to Dr. Ralf Britz, Head of the Ichthyology Section at the Senckenberg Society for Natural Research, the lumpsucker that Fedortsov reeled in is a mature female.
This fish’s adult maximum size is around 40 cm (15 in), and it can reach a weight of 2.3 kg (5 lbs).
Dr. Britz said: “The smaller male protects the eggs until they hatch. The fish in the image is a mature female, in which ovaries can account for 40% of body mass.
“Male parental care is quite common among fishes that exhibit parental care and much more common than female parental care.
“Snakehead fishes, labyrinth fishes, blennies, sticklebacks, and gobies are just a handful of examples of fishes with male parental care.”
“We are not alone,” one social media user joked, as others compared the fish to an alien
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