I am sure that this is an Aphyonid and I am sure that this is the first time a fish of this family has ever been seen alive.
This is really an unusual sighting.
Wow, look at those eyes! Oh my god.
Our interns think that the fish looks like Falkor, the dragon from the Neverending Story.
A lot of these are only known from single specimens collected with deep-sea trawling or dredging.
There has been a big debate about whether these are pelagic, living up in the water column,
or whether they’re associated with the bottom, like this one is.
So, not only do you have the first sighting, you’ve got some of the first evidence to not necessarily solve that debate,
but at least to make a strong argument that, yes, the family is a bottom-living family.
Some of us working with fish have wish lists, you know, a sort of bucket list, of what we might want to see,
and a fish in this family was probably first on those lists for a lot of us.
Wow. This is just remarkable.