The Fish Tank - Dragonfish

Aliens of the deep- Dragonfish.�£

Here's another deepwater ugly you may not have seen before!
It's called a dragonfish
It's another weird and wonderful creature from the deep waters of New Zealand and other parts of the world.

You can catch them as by-catch in the deepsea trawl fishery, and a lot of these ones get caught from time to time well out wide off the Canterbury Bight, and off Timaru deepsea bottom trawling between 8-900 metres of water.
They are actually quite small, and my mate Jason used to skipper a boat for Sanfords used to cut out the jaw with a razor blade wouldn't you believe it, and dry it out !

Unlike most deepsea fish, dragonfish can actually produce their own light!
It's supposedly an infrared type colour which other species can't perceive as infrared isn't visible to most fish species.
This gives them an enormous advantage of being able to provide light surrounding them when they're swimming around doing their thing deep down that most other fish species cannot see.

The dragonfish hunt and home in on their prey with the aid of that long feathery type looking thing which you can see below it's chin , and it's this feathery luminescent colour it produces at the end of it to attract prey, which then swims up to it and than whack!!!
It's all over rover for the poor fishy.

The dragonfish can certainly see the prey, but because of the infrared color it produces,the prey can't see the predator apart from that little florescent thing below it's chin the dragonfish produces when it's in hunting mode.

The dragonfish teeth are like sharp little needles.