This otherworldly juvenile snailfish (genus Pseudoliparis) with a frilly fin and no scales was filmed by researchers a whopping 8,336 meters deep — that’s more than five miles down — in the Pacific Ocean’s Izu-Ogasawara Trench south of Japan.
This remarkable sighting by team of researchers with the University of Western Australia’s Deep Sea Research Centre and with Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology happened during a 10-year study of some of the deepest fish populations in the world, a survey of the Japan, Izu-Ogasawara and Ryukyu trenches at 8,000m, 9,300m and 7,300m deep respectively.
Snail fish are astonishingly adaptable. Their gelatinous bodies and lack of a swim bladder are among their biological details that enable them to survive in the ocean’s depths, where pressure can be 800 times that near the surface. They dine on tiny crustaceans, which are relatively abundant in the ocean’s deep trenches.
This expedition’s findings highlight how we have only begun to discover what lives in our planet’s remarkable ocean. “Until this expedition, no one had ever seen nor collected a single fish from this entire trench,” notes Professor Alan Jamieson.
Oceanwire 
I suppose at such depths our own ideals of beauty are irrelevant. Yet, I am glad we are doing a better job of exploring the oceans. As long as it isn’t a plastic bag or an amazon package that they are filming down there, I am good with it.