Extraordinary Deep-sea Footage Captures Fish With ‘Feet’ Walking Across the Ocean Floor

NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research

The depths of the earth’s oceans represent a huge amount of as yet unexplored territory. As such, it is exciting, baffling, and awe-inspiring for the scientific community when curious new creatures appear and are caught on camera.

One such creature, a deep-sea fish recorded by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2016, continues to amaze an online audience with its unique method of traversing the bottom of the ocean floor.

As part of NOAA’s Océano Profundo exploration, the research vessel Okeanos Explorer was commissioned to collect critical data from underexplored deepwater areas surrounding Puerto Rico. While collecting data off the Mona Canyon, the ship’s cameras captured the strange phenomenon of a deep-sea fish “walking” along the ocean floor.

The fish was originally identified as a pink frogmouth (chaunax pictus), a type of anglerfish that uses modified fins to “walk” across the bottom of the ocean.

In startling footage captured by NOAA, the fish is shown making its way across the gravelly ocean floor on four foot-like appendages extending from the underside of its body.

The pink frogmouth fish eats shrimp, which it attracts by extending an additional appendage from its head. The fish inhabits a depth range of between 200 and 978 meters below sea level and has historically been recorded in both the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.

The 2016 sighting of the walking fish was not the first time this curious creature has been spotted. A similar-looking specimen was seen by NOAA back in 2001 off the east coast of North America in an area known as The Charleston Bump, a deep reef island in the Gulf Stream.

The deep-sea anglerfish pictured "walking away" as the NOAA research vessel approaches ©NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research

The fish was photographed raising itself on its foot-like “pelvic fins” to ward off its perceived predator, NOAA’s deep-sea research vessel the Johnson Sea-Link. On this occasion, the fish was identified by scientists as a different species of anglerfish known as a redeye gaper (chaunax stigmaeus).

Incredibly, the pink frogmouth and redeye gaper are not the only deep-sea fish that walk. Yet another elusive deep-sea dweller made an appearance in Florida on Nov. 19, 2019.

Footage of the walking fish, known as a goosefish, is spreading like wildfire since NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration caught the fish on camera and shared the footage online.

According to the New York Post, NOAA divers discovered the goosefish, more commonly known as a Schaefer’s anglerfish, sitting perfectly still on a protruding rock waiting to ambush its next meal. “From a distance, we thought it was a rock,” the oceanographers explained, “and imagine if you were a fish, a small fish; you wouldn’t even know.”

The camouflaged hunter is able to “eat things almost twice its size,” the oceanographers added, and beside propping itself up on rocks to await prey, it can also walk around on the ocean floor using “modified back fins.”

The goosefish was discovered 3,100 feet underwater off an island group known as the Dry Tortugas, 70 miles west of the Florida Keys.

Looking to the future, NOAA’s Océano Profundo project plans to continue exploring the North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Not only are scientists looking for new species, but they also hope to gain an increasingly fuller and more complex understanding of the ecosystem.

Deep-sea exploration “plays a pivotal role to humankind,” NOAA scientists explain on their official website, “providing a myriad of ecosystem services, such as food security, protection from hazards, trade, tourism, and recreation, which collectively provide employment and livelihood opportunities for millions of people.”