February 1, 2017 — We’re about 600 to 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. It’s cold, it’s dark and it’s slow down here. If you’re lucky, it’s blue in the daytime and black at night. And the deeper we go, the darker it gets.
Welcome to the twilight zone, fishies.
There’s not much to eat and no green plants growing either. Here, you eat what you can get, and find a way to eat it, or you starve.
It’s weird down here, in the mesopelagic zone of the deep sea. Creatures can be sluggish, but they are well adapted. Some use big eyes to find prey. Others make their own flashlights. Big mouths help predators eat big prey. That may be why barbeled dragonfishes have special head joints that allow them to open up their mouths 120 degrees and swallow big prey whole. This flexible head joint, described for the first time in a study published on Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, is unlike any other known to science.