Shannon Serpette is an award-winning journalist, having received 10 Illinois Press Association writing awards across a wide variety of categories. An avid metal detectorist, Shannon spends most of her vacations at the beach searching for buried treasure.
Follow her daily adventures on Twitter. Hey Buddy! Thank you. Share with friends Share on Facebook Share. Share on Twitter Share. A swim bladder is a gas filled sac that is present in most fish that live close to the water surface. It allows these fish to control its buoyancy. When the sac is filled with air, the fish will float to the surface. If blobfish had a swim bladder, it would immediately implode under pressure. Thus, they have adapted with a body structure consisting of mainly gelatinous mass and relative lack of muscle.
Their entire body is only slightly denser than water. This adaptive body structure allows them to float in the depths of the sea with very little energy expenditure. What does the blobfish eat?
As a predator of the deep sea, blobfish prey on other invertebrates by ambush and foraging. Their diet includes sea crabs, sea urchins, shellfish and mollusks. It is believed that they sit very still on the ocean floor and wait for prey such as shrimp and other invertebrates to pass by. When they do, the blobfish would gulp them up. No one has kept these fish in an aquarium setting, so it would be impossible to keep one as a pet.
These fish have never been kept alive outside of their natural habitat. Because of their body composition, you would have to be able to control the pressure to replicate their environment to keep them alive. If you could replicate their environment closely enough to keep them alive, it can be assumed their diet would be easy to replicate because it is so variable.
Very little is known about the normal behavior of blobfish. Their natural habitat at the ocean floor makes it difficult to conduct research.
What we do know is based mainly off of research conducted on specimens accidentally captured as bycatch. Because they lack extensive muscle structure we know they are slow moving, and float near the ocean floor in search of food. There are few predators in the deep sea, so these fish reproduce and grow quite slowly. Very little is known about the reproductive behaviors of blobfish because research is quite difficult. Read about other weird and wonderful creatures in our blog series.
Also, be sure to check out this year's top ten species , which includes another deep sea creature, the Lasiognathus dinema. Search Search. You are here Home News. Related Programs: Education and Human Resources.
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