Wednesday September 10, 2025
Smithsonian Magazine —
When you think of deep-sea fish, chances are you imagine sharp-toothed, foreboding-looking monsters. However, researchers have discovered three new deep-sea species in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and one in particular is surprisingly cute.
The team named the fishes in a study published August 27 in the journal BioOne. They describe the pink, round-headed Careproctus colliculi, dubbed the bumpy snailfish; the black, rounded-headed Careproctus yanceyi, or dark snailfish; and the long, black Paraliparis em, or sleek snailfish.
“Two of these are black snailfishes collected on the same dive by the submersible Alvin,” Mackenzie Gerringer, lead author of the study and a biologist from the State University of New York College at Geneseo, tells IFLScience’s Rachael Funnell. “The fact that two undescribed species of snailfishes were collected from the same place, on the same dive, at one of the better studied parts of the deep sea in the world highlights how much we still have to learn about our planet.”
Researchers using a submersible collected those two species—the dark snailfish and sleek snailfish—at a depth of 13,513 feet at Station M, a deep-sea research observatory around 130 miles from California’s central coast.
The bumpy snailfish, meanwhile, was collected by a remotely operated vehicle at 10,722 feet below the ocean’s surface in Monterey Canyon, California. This bubblegum-pink fish is “pretty adorable,” as Gerringer tells the New York Times’ Alexa Robles-Gil.
All three newly described species are members of the snailfish family Liparidae. You could say deep-ocean living runs in the family, as the deepest-dwelling fish are liparids. In general, snailfish have large heads and gelatinous bodies, and many of them have a suction disk on their bellies. This disk allows them to stick to rocks or the seafloor and hitchhike on other animals. Of the new species, only the sleek snailfish lacks a suction disk.
Snailfish “come in beautiful colors,” including blue, pink, white and purple, Johanna Weston, a deep ocean ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who did not participate in the study, says to the New York Times. “They also have a lovely little smile on their face.”
To define the three species, the team sequenced the DNA of each fish and documented details regarding their size, shape and other physical characteristics, including number of vertebrae.
“The two species collected at Station M are cryptic—their external morphologies are similar to one another,” Brett Woodworth, a co-author of the study and oceanographer now at the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping Joint Hydrographic Center, says in a statement. “Through both forms of identification, we were not only able to distinguish between the two species, but we could compare them to known species to gain better understanding of snailfish evolution in the deep sea.”
The dark snailfish, C. yanceyi, was named after Whitman College’s deep-sea biologist Paul Yancey, who was not involved in the study. Jeffrey Drazen, an ecologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a study co-author, explains in another statement that Yancey’s work “fundamentally shaped our understanding of deep-sea animal adaptation to high pressure.”
The scientific name for the sleek snailfish, P. em, is a nod to Station M, and the bumpy snailfish, C. colliculi, was named for its skin texture.
Ultimately, the study advances our still-murky knowledge of the diverse creatures populating the Earth’s largest habitat: the dark landscape of the deep ocean.