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A new, brightly colored species of deep-sea fish "delighted" scientists at the California Academy of Sciences, who were so distracted by their discovery that they were missing a huge six-pointed shark swimming above them .
The researchers were diving about 400 feet below the surface of an archipelago located 600 miles off the coast of Brazil, when they sighted the technicolor nestled in the rocky reef. The team described the new named species Tosanoides aphrodite after the Greek goddess of love and beauty – in the diary zookeys.
"I'm always delighted when we find new species, but this one was so spectacular and unexpected that we were almost euphoric throughout the dive," said Luiz Rocha, curator of fish at the Academy. Newsweek.
Although it bears the name of Aphrodite, with its spectacular pink and yellow stripes, the males of the species would not have been moved in a punk group or a part of black light of the 1980s. The females are decorated more soberly in a solid red-orange color.
"It's one of the most beautiful fish I have ever seen," Rocha said in a statement. "It was so enchanting that we ignored everything that surrounds it."
The mysterious creature inhabits an area of the ocean known as the Twilight Zone, out of reach of much of the light that strikes the surface. "The fish in the twilight zone tend to be pink or reddish," said Hudson Pinheiro, a researcher at the Academy. "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 team does not know exactly why these fish are developing their spectacular coloring, but that's an area of active research for the lab. "The prevailing hypothesis is that they use these colors as camouflage because there is no red or blue light there, but the men and women are so different that they are so different. they have to use it for something else, "Rocha said. Newsweek. "We are sequencing their vision genes in our lab to try to better understand that."
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The scientists examined the fish under a microscope and analyzed its DNA. They discovered that it is the first species of its kind known to inhabit the Atlantic Ocean.
Extending over an area 200 to 500 feet deep, the reefs of the Twilight Zone lie above the area explored by conventional submarines, but too deep for recreational divers. This means that dark and mysterious habitats are relatively unexplored and potentially rich in biological secrets.
Coral reefs are threatened by rising ocean temperatures and increasingly acidic waters. In 2016, a heat wave killed nearly a third of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. But scientists have recently reported that parts of the iconic system were recovering from this event, which also resulted in massive bleaching.
"In a time of global crisis for coral reefs, it is essential to better understand unexplored reef habitats and their colorful inhabitants to understand how to protect them," Rocha said in the statement.
Then his team plans to explore the Indian Ocean. "There has been virtually no scientific diving done at more than 200 feet," Rocha said. Newsweek. "Our team will travel to Zanzibar next December to change this and, hopefully, find new and more spectacular species."
In other maritime news, the researchers recently identified three new types of snail fish swimming five miles below the surface, at the bottom of the Atacama pit, a moat that crosses the ocean floor to about 100 miles from the Chilean and Peruvian coasts.
This article has been updated to include other comments from Luiz Rocha.
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