meet the sculpin
They were named the World’s Ugliest Animal according to the Ugly Animal Preservation Society. They took the Internet by storm in 2013. They’ve become a mascot of so-ugly-it’s-kinda-cute-I-guess.
Blobfish, or Psychrolutes microporos, is from a family of fish called Psychrolutidae. They are also called sculpins or fathead (the body shaming is unreal with this fish). They live in the cold deep sea approximately four thousand feet under and are found in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans.
If observed in their natural habitat, the blobfish looks just like a regular fish. Like most deep sea creatures, blobfish lack a solid skeleton. Instead, they rely on the pressure of the ocean to give them a form. When taken out of the water, their body relaxes and collapses into a gelatinous mess that has flabbergasted the Internet.
In the deep sea, the blobfish does not so much as swim as float. According to BBC, the blobfish floats like oil on water:
"If you think about how oil floats on water, it's a bit like that: having high fat content means it makes them more buoyant," says Watt. Blobfish simply bob along in the water or on the sea bed, staying largely still and using as little energy as possible.
The blobfish obeys many of the same rules as other deep sea creatures who have to do a lot with an environment that gives them very little. They swim around, eat some plankton, and find a mate, hopefully, as they pass their time at the bottom of the sea.
virginia woolf and the exploding monster
So, did Virginia Woolf write about blobfish? Kinda.
In her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), we get an image of a white monster who explodes when brought to the surface. Here’s the passage from zoologist Mr. Pepper:
Mr. Pepper went on to describe the white, hairless, blind monsters lying curled on the ridges of sand at the bottom of the sea, which would explode if you brought them to the surface, their sides bursting asunder and scattering entrails to the winds when released from pressure, with considerable detail and with such show of knowledge, that Ridley was disgusted, and begged him to stop.
There are some similarities here. We have a white, hairless, blind monster in the deep sea. It explodes when it comes out of the water; blobfish have been reported to do this when brought to the surface so quickly their body simply ruptures.
As I research in a paper I’m working on now about Woolf and the deep sea, scientists were learning a lot about the ocean bed when Woolf was writing. Most significantly, they discovered that life does exist on the ocean floor (take that Edward Forbes, who said that there was no life below 300 meters). So perhaps what Woolf describes is a blobfish or some other deep sea creature who exploded on scientists as they dove into the deep. We’ll never know. But one thing is for sure: blobfish have been making a splash for a long time.