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Hi I am what you call a Anglerfish we are Heterotrophic fish that live deep in the ocean waters, our family has history going as far back as 130 million years ago. Our scientific name is Lophiiformes we are classified with other groups such as teleost and we are nekton. I mostly live in the murky depths of the Atlantic ocean and Antarctic oceans, up to a mile below the surface. Although some of my family members have been seen in shallow tropical environments. Were mainly deep sea fish though.
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I prefer to live 1,000 meters under the surface but my family have been known to live anywhere from 200 meters deep to 4000 meters deep in the ocean. Though the ones that live that far down are very flat looking. Apparently the pressure down there does that to my family. One thing I love about living down so deep in the water, is that every day of the year always seems the same to me and I never know what is going on with the atmosphere or even when the season is changing. I also prefer the salinity levels at these depths it gets to 34.5 ppt and the temperatures are always the same usually averaging 2 degree Celsius
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Though the plates under me shift every now and then they don't really affect me personally all too much, but it does help because when it does the food around becomes more plentiful. I heard it has something to do with the hydrothermal vents. It apparently gives more marine organisms something to eat and then I can eat them YAY!
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The mud at the bottom is very nice and goes well with my skin color it lets me hide really well and other marine organisms don't even notice me. Most of my family members blend better with the ground It really helps for when we want to eat other fish. I prefer to mainly feed on other fish but can also eat marine snails, clams, worms and other crustaceans. Anglerfish like me in the deep seas can consume copepods, fish and other worms. To be realistic I will eat anything that comes to my mouth. All I have to do is wave my rod around and other marine organisms come to me and then I swallow them up. One thing I love about living so deep in the ocean is that every day of the year always seems the same down here. We aren't really affected by the atmosphere or season changes.
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Me and my family are at the top of the food chain, we can eat things over twice our size. We also have great sensitive lateral lines that help us sense prey and possible predators. The only time we ever get eaten is if it's by humans and every now and then due to complacency. It's one of the main reasons we can live over 20 years.
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We also survive so well due to the many things we adapted to over the years. If you ever see us anglerfish you are mainly looking at us females, we are many more times bigger than our male counterparts and we let them attach on to us. They survive off what we eat and we use them to lay their sperm and our eggs to breed. We also don't swim around often, we usually stay in one spot to conserve our energy. This is why we prefer our water to be low viscosity so we don't have to burn much energy in case we ever decide to move around
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Us anglerfish come in all shapes and sizes we are all pretty unique, even our rods aren't always the same some of us will use ones that look like worms and some of us get the nice glowing ones which is referred to as bioluminescent. Aren't we all so unique looking!
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Though we live deep in the ocean and away from human contact, we are sometimes hunted by people from Japan because were considered a delicacy. Being eaten isn't all too bad at least we are being used. The really sad part is when my family get snatched up as bycatch and die due to being accidently picked up in the water.
Citations are from:
- http://www.seasky.org/deep-sea/anglerfish.html
- http://animallist.weebly.com/angler-fish.html
- http://www.imr.no/temasider/fisk/breiflabb/en
- http://marinebio.org/oceans/deep/
- http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/anglerfish/