174 



ANIMAL LIFE OF THE DEEP SEA BOTTOM 



The blind fish Bathymicrops, caught by: a Galathea, b Albatross, c Michael Sars Expedition. 

 The figures indicate the depth of the catch in metres. 



rica. It was from a depth of 3,590 metres, "only" 3,590 metres, as, with 

 our experience of five trenches exceeding 7,000 metres, we so grandly 

 put it. Yet here was the most singular fish of the whole expedition, a 

 black, broad-headed creature nearly half a metre in length. It was a 

 deep-sea angler-fish; and to my colleagues' and my own delight I had 

 to admit that I had seen nothing like it on the Dana. 



The fact is that the Dana material includes the world's largest collec- 

 tion of deep-sea angler-fishes. But our Galatheathauma is not in it. A 

 description was given on page 85 of the bathypelagic angler-fishes with 

 a light organ on a stalk on the nose; we also caught a number of these 

 old aquaintances from the Dana in the Panama region. 



Here we had an altogether different type. The large light organ is now 

 inside the mouth, suspended from the roof behind pointed, curved teeth 

 which fringe the upper jaw like a comb. We found that a small specimen, 

 eight centimetres long, of a similar type had been taken by an American 

 expedition in 1908, in Indonesia in 1,385 metres of water and in a trawl 

 which, like ours, had fished on the bottom. Compared with this and with 



