When deep-sea cameras dropped 8,200 meters into the Mariana Trench in 2017, they expected to find lots of nothing. Instead they recorded a small ghostly fish drifting calmly past, the deepest fish ever filmed. They named it the Mariana snailfish.
Under almost 1,000 atmospheres of pressure, most animals don’t function. Their proteins crumple. Their bones snap. The snailfish has adapted by basically becoming jelly: its skin is translucent and slimy, its skull is partly open (so water pressure flows through instead of crushing inward), and its cells contain a special protective molecule that keeps proteins from collapsing.
If you brought one to the surface, it would simply dissolve. Its body design only works under intense pressure. The snailfish is, in a real sense, made to live in a place no other fish can survive.
