Bizarre Deep Sea Fish Dredged Up By Tsunami

spankfish writes "The following page features numerous great pictures of bizarre and creepy deep-sea creatures which have been dredged up by the recent tsunami and presented by normal divers. Fascinating stuff! The page is in Russian, but it's all about the pictures." Update: 01/15 18:02 GMT by J : As those of you who read the comments have already realized, this is an urban legend.

Bah! Humbug, or slow day?

[freitasm]

I've seen some worthy news not present on Slashdot... But wasting bandwidth with something already debunked by Snopes hosted on a crap server that is slashdotted with only 8 comments... Argh!

Re:Oops...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Snopes should be the first port of call for anything like this"

How true. I remember just two days ago at work having a bunch of people parroting the lies in SuperSize Me [techcentralstation.com], and they happened to bring up as an aside the infamous "100% Pure Beef Company" [www.aniz.ca] rumour. A little urban legend reading would be a handy thing these days.

It's a troll

[Lairdsville]

I thought I had seen these images before.
Sure enough, I had. From snopes [snopes.com] we get the explanation:

they are genuine images of some rather strange deep-sea creatures, these photographs have nothing to do with the Indian Ocean tsunami. They date from mid-2003 and were taken as part of the NORFANZ voyage, a joint Australian-New Zealand research expedition conducted in May-June 2003 to explore deep sea habitats and biodiversity in the Tasman Sea. These photographs can be viewed on Australia's National Oceans Office web site.

retraction

[shimbee]

shouldn't slashdot have some sort of journalistic responsibility to retract posts that are clearly hoaxes? many "legitimate" news sources often refer to slashdot as a real reference, and leaving hoaxes up un-changed seems unethical.

Let's not get carried away here.

[tinkerton]

Pun intended. Agreed, it's a hoax. Just like with a wave in a pipe, what you push in on one side does not come out at the other side. A wave travels a long way but the material in the pipe just shifts a little bit. And the basic model of a tsunami is just water bungeeing to and fro a bit and ending up where it started. No body of water is displaced very far.

But if you think of general fluid dynamics, it is possible that a relatively small body of water travels a long way(many miles, not many thousands of miles). It's plausible that sea creatures surface after such an earthquake. They would surface in the middle of the ocean. And then there's sea currents.

'Weird' Fish and Processed Food

[Uber Banker]

You joke, but these fish are part of the human food chain. There are little/no rules on deep sea fishing in international waters. Commonly trawlers drag their nets across the deepest depths of the ocean catching these type of fish - apparantly plentiful. The fish then get processed into feed for Salmon farming, or even into condiments and flavourings for everyday food.

. THis is a worrying phenomenon for environmentalists - because we know so little about deep sea fish we have no idea if we're making species extinct or disrupting the natural ocean food chain.

If you find anything huge

[AndroidCat]

then don't stand too close to it [msn.com], okay? (messy photo warning) And certainly, don't try to blow it up [perp.com] with explosives! There's even a wiki [wikipedia.org]these days.

Re:Oops...

[Ralph Wiggam]

There was an American family quoted in many news stories that were scuba diving during the tsunami and didn't notice anything had happened until they saw debris floating above.

I actually know that family from elementary school. What an amazing story.

-Barry

Deep-sea destroyers

[ornel]

These "weird fish" are brought up in enormous amounts every day by the world's deep-sea bottom trawling fleet, mostly from France, Spain and Russia. I was part of a Greenpeace expedition [greenpeace.org] last fall in the North Sea, and I saw them throw away as bycatch tons of fish, with eyes popping out from the change in pressure, including some shown in the Snopes website. Scientists know next to nothing about the deep seas, but the fishing industry is right now destroying some of the last pristine environments left on Earth.