WEBVTT

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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.

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This is really an unusual sighting.

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Wow, look at those eyes! Oh my god.

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Our interns think that the fish looks like Falkor, the dragon from the Neverending Story.

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A lot of these are only known from single specimens collected with deep-sea trawling or dredging.

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There has been a big debate about whether these are pelagic, living up in the water column,

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or whether they’re associated with the bottom, like this one is.

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So, not only do you have the first sighting, you’ve got some of the first evidence to not necessarily solve that debate,

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but at least to make a strong argument that, yes, the family is a bottom-living family.

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Some of us working with fish have wish lists, you know, a sort of bucket list, of what we might want to see,

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and a fish in this family was probably first on those lists for a lot of us.

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Wow. This is just remarkable.