Short Wave - Meet The Bony-Eared Assfish And Its Deep Sea Friends

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

Yi-Kai Tea, a biodiversity research fellow at the Australian Museum in Sydney, has amassed a social media following as @KaiTheFishGuy for his sassy writing and gorgeous photos of fish and other wildlife. Kai recently returned from an expedition aboard an Australian research ship to explore the deep seas surrounding a new marine park in the Indian Ocean. Led by the Museums Victoria Research Institute, dozens of scientists aboard mapped the ocean floor and, using nets dropped to as deep as six kilometers, gathered thousands of specimens, ranging from the utterly adorable deep sea batfish to the terrifying highfin lizardfish to the unfortunately named bony-eared assfish. Today on the show, Kai takes host Aaron Scott on a tour of the ocean floor and the fantastical creatures that call it home. "They are masters of the realm," says Kai. "You can't live in 3,000 meters of water and not be a master at what you do. And the fact that these creatures are living down there, thriving and making the most out of these habitats, that's a remarkable feat." See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Dr. E. Kite loves to talk about fish. His social media handle is Kai the Fish Guy. And so after a recent trip on a deep sea research vessel, he was pretty excited. If you talk about fishes, I can literally go on and on. And I, when I'm giving presentations in my office or my lab group, I tend to go on and on about one particular fish. And they're like, cut it down, cut it down.

You know, like big picture. Talk about the big picture. I feel like I would be remiss if I can at least ask about the bony-eared ass fish. Yeah, bony-eared ass-fish. It's a fish that I really wanted to find on this trip. And we got one on our very first troll in remarkable condition. It has a barber's gelatinous head with really tiny eyes. It has a sad-looking droopy mouth.

And it has big, spiny projections behind its head that has given it its common name. bone-eared. Asfish. As-fish. Where does the ass-fish come from? You know, one of my colleagues actually lectured us on the etymology behind ass-fish. I, for the life of me, cannot remember because I was too busy laughing. We'll put our fact-checker on that.

We did this, of course. Turns out, it probably connected to the Greek word for donkey. But it also might be more fun just to let that mystery remain. So, Kai met this ass-fish on an expedition to explore the deep. seas surrounding a new marine park in the Indian Ocean. Kai is the Biodiversity Research Fellow at the Australian Museum in Sydney, which is one of several museums that collaborated on the expedition. They found thousands of specimens ranging from the utterly adorable deep sea batfish to the

terrifying hyphen lizard fish. They estimate that about a third of them could be new to science, and each of them is a marvel of deep sea evolution. It's funny to poke fun at these creatures, and it's, you know, it's good to be have a laugh, but these are things that have been around for millions of years. They've been around, you know, way longer than we've had. They are masters of their realm. You can't, you know, live in 3,000 meters of water and not be a master at what you do. It's just an in-hospitable environment. And the fact that these creatures are living down there to the best of their

ability, thriving and making the most out of these habitats. That's just to me a remarkable feat. You know, so we can laugh at the ass fish all we want, but it's just they deserve the respect that we give for all animals equally. Today on the show, Kai the Fish Guy takes us on a tour of the ocean floor and the fantastical creatures that call it home. I'm Aaron Scott, and you're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. To begin, would you set the scene for us? I mean, introduce us to the investigator and this recent ocean expert. edition that you went on. Yeah, so the investigator is a really big and amazing research vessel that's based in Hobart, Tasmania. We basically wanted to survey phonal diversity in deep

oceanic reefs and underwater volcanoes of the Christmas Island and Cocos Island Marine Parks. So these are marine parks that were recently designated as protected zones in remote, far-off territories in Australia. It's basically a twofold operation. One, it's to map out the seafloor, get a better understanding of what the area actually looks like, the terrain, because these are all fairly recent volcanic islands, but we have no idea what, you know, the geology is like. And then also the actual biodiversity sampling essays to see what's living down there. So, you know, in addition to finding brand new species new to signs, we're also helping to expand our knowledge on what's living in these areas.

what the connectivity of the oceans are like, what the natural distribution of fishes are like? Are they found in areas bigger than what we initially thought they were occupying? These are all questions that can be answered when you do a survey like that. And so, like, 50 people on the boat is a huge vessel. I mean, I was actually shocked by how big it is. What was day-to-day life like at sea? What are you actually doing?

Look, you know, it's amazing that when I feel, first got on the ship, I was, you know, kind of, I had, I've been on expeditions before, but not, you know, one of this duration or size. I usually go on, you know, like, week-long trips with three or four people on a small catamaran. So this was something that's very new for me. When we put the nets down to collect fish and invertebrates, it can, you know, take as long as six hours, depending on how long the nets are for doing a 5,000-meter troll or a 6,000-meter troll that can take, you know, many, many hours to get the nets down and bring the nets back up again. I mean, like, I wake up.

I start my shift at 2 in the morning, 2 a.m. But I wake up, you know, feeling really excited. Just, you know, it's like Christmas every day. You don't really know what's going to come up in the nets. You don't really know what's going to be in the trolls. And give us a little sense of what the environment is like down there. I mean, this deep sea ocean as compared to the coral reef ecosystems that you tend to study. What is it like for the creatures that live there and what are some of the things that they've adapted or evolved in order to live in that space?

One of the main differences, obviously, is temperature. Water is really, really cold down there. And the other difference would be light and pressure. So there's absolutely no light down there. And the water pressure is a lot higher than what you would have up in the shallow realms. But the animals that live down there, they're really, really well adapted to living in these environments. Because of the cold temperature and because of the lack of food there, a lot of animals that have grown. really, really low metabolic rates.

So they're not very active. They don't really swim much. They kind of just spend their lives either floating through the water column or just sitting at the bottom of the seafloor. A lot of them have really big teeth that allows them to, well, not only capture prey items, but make sure that whatever they're catching is not escaping. And to deal with the water pressure,

a lot of them have really low muscle density as well. They're really gelatinous. They're really blobby. So the pressure keeps them in shape. But when you take them up to the surface, you just see that they just kind of melt onto the table in a way. They're just really gelatinous. The flesh is really watery. gelatinous creatures with big teeth.

Yeah, and the lights too. So a lot of animals down there are bioluminescent. So they produce their own light. And bioluminescence in animals can arise in two different ways, either intrinsically. So they're actually producing light based on chemicals that they're producing. innately, or they're doing it symbiotically with bacteria that, light producing bacteria that they house in special organs called photophores. So it's really interesting, actually. You have, you know, all these creatures down there that can produce light, but they're producing

different coloured lights, and they're producing lights in different ways, they're producing lights in different areas, but they're all kind of doing it to achieve the same thing, either for camouflage or for communicating or for attracting prey. It sounds like a fish disco-tech. It is. And it's really, it's, I mean, look, I mean, Aaron, like you, you read about these things in books, right? Like, I've known about lanternfishes my entire lives. I've known about, you know, angler fishes and all these light producing things. But seeing them in person and holding them in your hand and looking at the photophores. I mean, these are just remarkable creatures. The photophores are so beautiful. They're just, you know, such luminousine organs. And they produce purple and blue and red lights. And it's just, ah, it's just, you know, stunning. And it. Yeah, you know, truly an experience of a lifetime. In some ways, like you said, it's like Christmas pulling this net up. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the favorite critters amongst all the things you guys pulled up?

What were some of the highlights for you? We found a bunch of new, potentially new species. We got a few, you know, really exciting finds, things like the viper fish and pelican eels and tripod fishes, things that, you know, you read about your entire lives but you never thought you actually see one and these were just you know childhood favorites of mine that I've known about you know basically since I was 10 but have never thought in my wildest dreams that I would see and hold one in person and one you mentioned the tripod fish is literally I mean it looks like a little sardine or something with tripo yeah no literally a tripod coming off yeah if you don't know if you're listening to this and you have no

what a tripod fish looks like it's literally a third fish on a set of tripods. It literally has almost, you can't see me but I'm air quotation marks legs. The thin rays are really long and they're really stiff as well. They're stiffened and at the tip

of the rays there's a little fleshy foot like a club and they basically just prop themselves off the seafloor much like a camera on a tripod stand and they just stay there motionless for hours and they're just waiting for a little bits of food to pass

spy and they just, you know, step them up. But yeah, it's just, these things are just absolutely mind-blowing. Speaking of mind-blowing, the deep-sea batfish really seemed to make some waves on social media. Right. Yeah. Where do I even begin? They look like ravioli or pierogies or dumplings. To me, it looked like a deflated sweet dumpling. But these are sometimes called pancake fishes and they are very flat and if you look underneath the body, the fins are modified. into tiny little almost legs, and they use it to basically crawl along the seafloor. So these are things with very, very poor dispersal mechanisms.

They move at a pace that is just glacial. But they have enormous distributions. I mean, some of these species are found across the equator. Like, how are they dispersing and how are they getting across the oceans? And are they really one species? So these are the kind of questions that we're really interested in answering. We want to know more about not only what these fishes are, but how are they getting here and why are they living here? And whether or not this population that's found in the Coccus Island, you know, are they the same as the ones that are found in Japan, for example, Asia?

These are all questions that we're really interested in answering. So dozens of scientists spent 35 days on this boat, you all pulled up, I'm going to guess, like thousands of actual specimens. So much work. So much work. And I mean, which I feel like we need to almost end with like, what is the big goal? I mean, why to you is it important that we are putting all this work and all these resources into cataloging this life? Well, you know, I think it's really, really important to, you know, first of all, realize that, you know, we live in a world with very finite resources. And things that are living down in these areas are not, they're not immune and they're not impervious to the threats that are faced from the shallow water, you know, counterparts in shallower coral reefs.

right. And in order to protect these things, we need to know what they are first. So the first step in any biodiversity sampling is to understand what's living down there, and then to put names on things that don't have names. And secondly, when we do a collection like that, it's not just helping us understand what's living down there, it's helping us to understand what's living down there at this point in time. It's like a snapshot in time, right? So it's a scientist from 50 years down the line, 100 years down the line, they can look back at all the specimens we've collected today and say that, hey, you know, 50 years ago, this animal was living in this region.

You know, if it's not here now, it's probably extinct, but maybe it's found here now. Maybe it's not found there in the past. So it's not just the research that's conducted today, but also the research that's conducted down in the future, you know, for future generations to come and other scientists around the world to access and better understand our world collectively

through the stuff that we're collecting. Better understand what's living in our world so that we can protect it better. Kai, it's been a delight to talk deep-sea fishes with you. Yeah, thank you. Likewise. And thank you so much for having me on here. This episode was produced by Thomas Liu, edited by Gabriel Spitzer and fact-checked by Britt Hansen.

The audio engineer was Josh Newell. Brendan Crump is our podcast coordinator. Beth Donovan is our senior director of programming. And Anya Grundman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Aaron Scott. Thanks, as always, for listening to Shortwave from NPR. You know,