Chimera fish
Nevertheless, ray-finned fishes are an important and diverse part of deep-sea pelagic communities throughout the ocean. The number and diversity of ray-finned fishes decline with depth and is lower within the bathypelagic than it is within the mesopelagic, with epipelagic species the most diverse.
#Chimera fish full
Collecting and bringing fish up intact from such depths is difficult and it is only now that we are starting to obtain sufficient photographs and film footage to show the full structure and function of these animals. In many species this has entailed bizarre changes in body form, away from the ‘classic’ idea of fish shape and anatomy. However, above this depth there are many small pelagic species especially lantern sharks (Etmopteridae), which as their name suggests, produce bioluminescent light (see Bioluminescence in Section 2.6.4) from photophores on the underside of their bodies.īathypelagic ray-finned fishes have developed numerous ways of minimizing their energy requirements and have evolved specialised methods for hunting, finding a mate, and so on ( Section 2.6.4). Both pelagic and benthic species are effectively absent below about 3000 m ( Priede et al., 2006), probably mainly due to a scarcity of food which cannot match their high metabolic requirements. Most sharks are found in coastal waters and over continental slopes, down to about 2000 m.
![chimera fish chimera fish](http://www.seawater.no/fauna/chordata/images/IMG2014-9815.jpg)
Chimaeras are generally deepwater species and are found from around 200 to 3000 m, where they live near the seabed hunting for invertebrates and fish. Hagfish are found as deep as 5000 m, but these are benthic fishes. Frances Dipper, in Elements of Marine Ecology (Fifth Edition), 2022 5.3.1 Deep-sea fishesĮlasmobranchs, chimaeras and ray-finned fishes are all represented in the bathypelagic zone.