With a gaping mouth full of teeth, the black seadevil earned its name fair and square.
The three and a half inch female anglerfish can eat fish larger than she is, according to The San Jose Mercury News, luring her prey in with a "light bulb" fishing rod on her forehead, like some kind of deadly mistletoe.
The male anglerfish are only about half an inch big. Their short lives have one purpose, according to Mercury News: to find a mate. The male anglerfish is not equipped to fend for himself and without a mate, he would likely die. The male finds a female and bites her gelatinous flesh. As time goes by, the male actually fuses with the female, becoming one with her skin, sharing a bloodstream and organs. His eyes and organs are lost - except the testes. A female could have more than six males attached to her at any time, according to National Geographic.
The black seadevil is a species of the anglerfish and is rarely seen, especially alive and swimming.
"A video would tell us a lot about how it moves, swims, orients to gravity," Ted Pietsch, professor at the University of Washington and expert on the deep-sea anglerfish, told Mercury News.
Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute captured on film a black seadevil while it swam 2,000 feet below the surface. (The fish typically lives in water four times deeper, according to Mercury News).
"We've been diving out here in the Monterey Canyon regularly for 25 years, and we've seen three," said Bruce Robison, research division chairman of the aquarium's research institute.
Robison's team is studying how much oxygen deep-sea animals use,
Mercury News reported. The black seadevil they filmed was captured, but scientists do not know how long it will live.
The researchers concern is the warming bay water. As ocean temperatures rise, oxygen levels decrease. In the last 30 years, the bay has warmed a tenth to two-tenths of a degree.
"You can see that the temperature is creeping up slowly, probably because of global warming," Robinson said. "If the temperature continues to rise and the amount of oxygen continues to decrease, things are going to change."
"Animals that live in the oxygen minim zones are adapted to low oxygen, but they might be close to their limit," Brad Seibel, an assistant professor of marine biology at the University of Rhode Island, told Mercury News.
According to Seibel, if animals need oxygen, they may migrate to colder, shallower waters, but their predators and prey may not migrate similarly. Ecosystems would be altered.
