This video of the pointy-nosed blue chimaera was recorded when the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute sent a remotely operated vehicle on several dives as deep as 6,700 feet off California and Hawaii in 2009.
The geologists were not looking for sharks, but were familiar with the two known species of ghost shark, also known as chimaeras, that had been identified off the California coast.
This fish did not resemble either species, so the team reached out to the California Academy of Sciences and Moss Landing Marine Laboratories for help in identifying it.
“Normally, people probably wouldn’t have been looking around in this area, so it’s a little bit of dumb luck,” says Dave Ebert, program director for the Pacific Shark Research Center at MLML, in an interview with National Geographic.
The video, courtesy of the research institute, has more information about the fish:
Ebert and his colleagues published a paper in October 2016 that identified the ghost shark in the video as a pointy-nosed blue chimaera.
If they are correct, this is the first time this species of ghost fish has been recorded on video alive and in its natural habitat.
For more details about the discovery, see this article at the research institute’s website.
