Truth about the Blobfish

The blobfish: subject of ridicule, mockery, and general unabashed lampooning, is possibly the most long-suffering victim of modern-day scientific misinformation to date.

The mistreatment and slandering of blobfishes has truly gone too far. If I had a nickel every time I saw this image of a bloated, deformed pink fish on the internet, I could buy the school three times over. It’s true, the gelatinous skin texture, the button eyes, the drooping, nose-like structure which flaps like a pancake over a pair of sausage lips—are all extremely ridiculous features, inspiring immense shame and repulsion in the viewer. However, what if I told you that this was not the true visage of the blobfish?

Behold, the first deep-sea photo of a living Psychrolutes phrictus (deep-sea sculpin) specimen in its natural state. Note the hydrodynamic shape. Note the significant lack of drooping skin. Note the sensible grey colouring of the skin. Note, especially, the intelligent eyes. Consider, then, the contrast between this image and the horrific pink thing so often heralded as the true “blobfish”.

The truth is that before this photo was captured off of the Davidson Seamount (1317m deep point near the coast of California) in 2021, all circulating photos of the blobfish were taken after the specimen in the picture underwent extreme decompression damage before being photographed.

To elaborate, blobfish live in deep ocean trenches where the pressure could flatten a human being down to a pancake less than 5cm in thickness. Therefore, they’ve evolved a soft, boneless body which the immense oceanic pressures press them into a fish-like shape. They also possess layers of insulating fat in their cell membrane, usually frozen by the deep-sea temperatures. When blobfishes are brought to the surface, their bodies depressurize, losing their shape, coloring, and structural integrity. Their fat layers dissolve in the comparative extreme heat. To the uneducated eye, they may look as if they are “melting” and turning blobby. Hence, the images of the lumpy, floppy, seemingly corpulent pink blobfish—forever seared into the public imagination like an iron brand.

To put it in perspective, it’s like if we ejected an innocent person into the vacuum of space, watched as their bodies swelled and boiled, and then made a meme out of their deformed corpse. Yeah. This is heavy stuff.

You should be ashamed of yourself, you who jeer and laugh at the abused and slandered blobfish, or rather, properly, the deep-sea sculpin, if you have the decency the address it by its actual name.

The sculpin is a noble creature of dignity and majesty, and it deserves your respect. The mistreatment it has thus suffered under the marketability-over-honesty social media culture of today is unforgivable. The misinformation surrounding the appearance of this honourable species reveals some of the darker traits of modern man. We judge without knowing. We shame without understanding. This should not be the accepted behavior of an intelligent species, and we can do better.