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The researchers discovered a new species of ultra-colorful neon fish in an isolated Brazilian archipelago, a rare find they were very excited about. The bright pink and yellow fish species, named Tosanoides Aphrodite, have been observed at a depth of 400 feet below the surface of the ocean. It bears the name of the Greek goddess of love and beauty and is the only fish of this type ever found in the Atlantic.
"It's one of the most beautiful fish I have ever seen," said Luiz Rocha, an ichthyologist from the California Academy of Sciences. "It was so enchanting that we ignored everything that surrounds it."
The dazzling fish and neon inhabit the waters of St. Paul's Rocks, an isolated archipelago almost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Its twilight zone is incredibly rich in unique species that we find nowhere else on Earth. The twilight zone is the part of the ocean where only a small amount of sunlight reaches and the creatures are exposed to darkness all their lives. Although living in a truly extreme environment, species can survive and thrive in the reef of the Twilight Zone.
"The fish in the twilight zone tend to be pink or reddish," said Dr. Hudson Pinheiro, who collected the fish for further study in the laboratory. "The red light does not penetrate into these dark depths, making the fish invisible unless they are illuminated by a light like the one we carry when diving."
The discovery was made with the aid of the research vessel M / V Alucia, capable of diving to depths of thousands of meters. With the help of the ship, a deep diving research team ventured into mysterious coral habitats extending on a narrow strip of ocean located between 200 and 500 feet below the sea. surface and spotted the unique fish species in late June. The male of Tosanoides aphrodite has pink and yellow stripes, while the females have a solid orange color. The dive team also found a six-gram shark swimming directly above them.
"The Tosanoides aphrodite is only known from Saint Paul's Rocks, off Brazil. It was found on mesophotic coral ecosystems of the island, observed between 100 and 130 m depth during the rebreather dive, and a single observation at 260 m depth, taken from a submersible dive. The species inhabits small crevices of complex rocky reefs. The authors wrote in the study. "The ambient temperature of the seawater at the depth of the collection (~ 120 m) varied between 13 and 15 ° C during the two weeks we spent in the area."
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