Blobfish

• GeneralIn its own habitat it looks perfectly ordinary: the famously gelatinous face is what decompression does to it on the way to the surface.
• In 2013 it was voted the world's ugliest animal in a poll run by the Ugly Animal Preservation Society, to draw attention to threatened species that lack charisma.
• It has hardly any muscle or skeleton: its gelatinous flesh, slightly less dense than water, lets it hover over the bottom without expending energy and without a swim bladder.
• Its gelatinous, drooping appearance is an artefact of the surface: at the pressure of its own habitat it is shaped like an ordinary fish, and it only deforms when hauled up quickly by the sudden drop in pressure.
• It has no swim bladder; instead its flesh is a gelatinous mass slightly less dense than water, which lets it hover above the bottom without spending energy on swimming.
• It has very little muscle, which costs it nothing because it feeds on whatever drifts past, mainly bottom-living crustaceans.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (bony fish)

Habitat and environment

Continental slope bottoms (600-1,200 m)

Litter / clutch size

Recent studies suggest that the female lays thousands of pink eggs in nests on the sea floor and may stay beside them guarding them

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Psychrolutes marcidus · Sintesis sobre Psychrolutidae y observaciones recientes en aguas australianas · FishBase, Psychrolutes marcidus (May & Maxwell 1986) · FishBase, Psychrolutes marcidus · FishBase · ficha de especie de Psychrolutes marcidus

Best time: It lives between 600 and 1,200 m deep on the continental slope of south-eastern Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand, where the pressure is 60 to 120 times that at the surface