pink-looking blobfish with black eyes droops on a table
"Mr. Blobby" is a blobfish discovered in 2003 off the coast of New Zealand. The preserved specimen is now housed at the Australian Museum in Sydney. jamasca66 via Flickr under CC BY-NC 2.0
Squishy, pale and gelatinous, the blobfish isn’t winning any beauty pageants. But this deep-sea dweller—which has been dubbed the world’s ugliest animal—did manage to win over the hearts and minds of many New Zealanders.
This week, the blobfish was crowned New Zealand’s Fish of the Year. The annual contest, which started in 2021, is organized by the Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust, an environmental advocacy group that aims to raise awareness about the importance of protecting deep-sea ecosystems.
The blobfish narrowly eked out the victory, beating the runner-up—the orange roughy—by just 277 votes. In the final days of the competition, the flabby fish got a little extra push when two New Zealand radio hosts began encouraging listeners to join Team Blobfish.
“We and the people of New Zealand had had enough of other fish getting all the headlines,” Sarah Gandy and Paul Flynn, hosts on More FM, say in a statement. “The blobfish … has been bullied his whole life, and we thought, ‘Stuff this, it’s time for the blobfish to have his moment in the sun.’”
Blobfish spend their lives lurking in the dark, frigid depths of the ocean, up to around 4,000 feet beneath the surface. Dozens of species of blobfish live throughout the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, and they’re all part of the Psychrolutidae family.
Outside the water, blobfish look like jiggly mounds of unstructured flesh. But when they’re swimming around their deep-sea habitats, they look like fairly standard fish, with wide heads that taper back toward slender tails.
Why such a drastic change in appearance? It all comes down to pressure. Since it lives in the deep ocean, the blobfish has evolved to withstand intense water pressure—more than 100 times the air pressure on land. The high pressure of the deep ocean is what gives the blobfish its shape. When the fish are brought to the surface, however, the comparative lack of pressure causes their bodies to collapse into shapeless puddles of goo. A more accurate name for these creatures might be “blob-above-water-fish,” as Madeline Black wrote in 2020 for Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group.
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One blobfish specimen has been affectionately nicknamed “Mr. Blobby”—and the species has gained worldwide renown. Still, the blobfish remains a rather mysterious creature, since it lives in such remote, hard-to-reach places. For example, scientists don’t know much about their eggs, larvae or life expectancy. Researchers aren’t even sure how they mate.
“Nobody knows,” Mark McGrouther, an ichthyologist at the Australian Museum, told Smithsonian magazine’s Franz Lidz in 2015. “I’d guess they lock in a clinging, rather conjugal embrace.”
The blobfish’s conservation status is also unclear, because scientists have a hard time tracking their population trends. But a 2022 study found that ugly fish tend to be the most evolutionarily distinct—and are more likely to be threatened, compared to species that humans find attractive. That trend suggests humans overlook the fish that need the most conservation support in favor of more beautiful species, a phenomenon researchers call an “aesthetic-related debt.” This debt is not unique to fish, either. Studies have also found a connection between public appeal and conservation support for mammals, too.
The runner-up for New Zealand’s Fish of the Year, the orange roughy, is a fellow deep-sea dweller, living nearly 2,000 feet below the waves. These creatures take a long time to mature and reproduce slowly. So, when fishermen in Australia and New Zealand began hauling in huge groups of them starting in the 1980s, their population plummeted. Fishing restrictions are now in place, but the orange roughly is still struggling to rebound.
In fact, nine out of the ten top nominees for Fish of the Year are considered vulnerable by conservationists. Runners up included various sharks, the longfin eel and the big-belly seahorse.
In the end, the contest between the blobfish and the orange roughy was a “battle of the deep-sea forget-me-nots,” says Kim Jones, co-director of the Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust, in the statement. “A battle of two quirky deep-sea critters, with the blobfish’s unconventional beauty helping get voters over the line.”