Invasion of the Pacific Footballfish! - The New Yorker
Invasion of the Pacific Footballfish!
One morning in May, Ben Estes, a retired Hollywood grip ("Terminator," "True Lies") and a lifelong surf caster, was walking on the beach in Orange County when he came upon something weird. "It looked like a deflated black balloon that had thorns on it," he said. "Its mouth had some teeth you could almost see through. They were like pins. They were crazy teeth. And that thing that was hanging off its head, it looked pretty crazy. Not like anything I'd ever seen before."
He gave the balloon a poke. He adjusted the crazy-looking head tassel. And then the thing moved. "Its mouth just opened really wide, a slow eeer," Estes said, making the sound of a door opening on creaky hinges. Later, he learned that the mouth is designed to swallow prey whole.
When Estes showed his family some pictures he had taken, his daughter, who was four when "Finding Nemo" came out, recognized the creature right away. "She said, 'I know what that is. It's the monster-looking fish that chased Nemo around,' " Estes recalled.
The creature was a female Pacific footballfish, an exceedingly rare deep-sea anglerfish that lives thousands of feet underwater, in the midnight zone, and sports a bioluminescent lure that it uses to attract prey. (The males are tiny, lightless, possibly toothless, and even harder to find.) Its close cousins are the seadevils (spiny, prickly, warty); more distantly, it's related to the frogfish, the batfish, and the sea toad.
The ichthyology world was stoked about Estes's find. The last time a Pacific footballfish had been collected in California was in 2001. "It was pretty exciting to see such a rare anglerfish," Ben Frable, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said. "Fast-forward to November, and I get an e-mail from a local news station." Another Pacific footballfish had washed up, this time in San Diego.
"My heart was racing," Frable said. "I didn't get any information, just 'There's this weird fish—can you identify it?' " But, by the time he went to check it out, it had been scavenged or had washed back out to sea. In December, a colleague at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration passed Frable another tip out of San Diego. "There was a 'weird deep-sea fish, like what was in the news,' " Frable said. Bingo. That fish went to Scripps and became one of about thirty specimens worldwide.
Estes's find went to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where she has been named, via a public Twitter poll, Spiny Babycakes. Last week, Bill Ludt, the ichthyology collection's curator, and Todd Clardy, its manager, welcomed a visitor to the room where the museum's three million fish specimens are stored.
"So this is where she lives now," Clardy said. "She's in a metal tank. She's a little too large to put in a jar." Sharing the tank were two warty seadevils, one of which, collected from the stomach of a sperm whale in the nineteen-seventies, had a parasitic male attached. In many types of anglerfish, the male fuses to the female, sharing her circulatory system and trading sperm for food. Among its relatives, the footballfish is an outlier, Ludt said: "It's strange in that it doesn't have parasitic males."
Clardy put on a rubber glove and eased the footballfish out: fifteen inches of tarry blob, with a startling underbite. "She's basically a swimming head," he said. "Several rows of nice sharp teeth." In the throat, more teeth. "The whole point of this is, whenever they encounter something they can possibly eat, gotta be able to capture it—don't let it get away—and eat it. You don't know when the next opportunity will come."
Little is known about the species' biology. Clardy and Ludt have already discovered a previously unknown feature of the fish: in addition to bioluminescence, it appears capable of fluorescence. Even less is known about its behavior, as one has never been observed at depth. The triple stranding is also a head-scratcher. "Why are these deep-sea fish washing up on the beach?" Scripps's Frable wondered. Was it oil spills, ocean-dumped DDT, sonic booms? "People on the Internet are coming up with Marvel-movie-style theories about why."
Ludt, at the museum, thinks it's possible that the fish are gathering somewhere to breed, then dying. "But we don't know," he said. The fish Estes found had an empty stomach; the December fish was full of sand.
The scientists agreed that the footballfish bonanza was probably just luck. That's how Dwight Hwang felt, too. He's an Orange County-based gyotaku artist, who makes fish prints. "It's a bucket-list fish that I thought would be wonderful but impossible ever to get," he said. "When it hit international news, I had people contacting me all the way from Australia, saying, 'You need to print this thing!' " Before Spiny Babycakes was preserved, the museum allowed him to do so. Then, in December, Hwang scored again. He hooked a footballfish playing Animal Crossing, where it appears only in winter months, at night, then disappears. ♦
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