You Lookin' At Me?

And now, the blobfish. The blobfish has become something of an Internet sensation due to its oddly human visage (see below) and its generally indolent lifestyle, but very little is really known about its daily activities or its genetic lineage. Being a creature of the deep, it seldom graces us with its presence and when it does it is so wholly out of its natural circumstances that it surely doesn’t make its best impression; sort of like a Texan at a Mensa meeting.

The blobfish (Psychrolutes marcidus) is a resident of the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of southern Australia and Tasmania. That part of the world is generally a pretty weird neighborhood, including bird-eating sharks, coconut eating crabs and meat eating caterpillars, but the blobfish is not so much known for what it eats as for how it eats. The blobfish, as its name might imply, is sort of the Homer Simpson of the marine world and feeds by floating around with its mouth open, hoping something tasty will blunder in. This is very similar to my feeding habits during football season wherein I position myself strategically upon the couch and pirate pizza, chicken wings and egg rolls as they are transported through my territory by unsuspecting family members.

The blobfish’s indolence extends to its method of locomotion which is essentially floating wherever the current may lead. Given its minimal musculature, the blobfish is generally unable to get up much steam, like most of Newt Gingrich’s ideas. The good news for the blobfish, which, after all, didn’t ask for this life, is that most of its body is composed of a low density goo which is both unappetizing and slightly less dense than sea water, allowing the blobfish to mostly avoid predation as well as preventing it from becoming mired in the layer of fish dung and beer cans which coats the undersea landscape off the Australian coast.

The reproductive life of the blobfish is poorly understood by marine biologists, who are puzzled that anything so homely could get any action, but anyone who has ever been really drunk at 3:00 in the morning will probably regrettably testify that aesthetics are not always the primary issue in mating behavior. In any event, the female blobfish squirt out their embryonic progeny upon rocks on the ocean floor and the eggs are then fertilized by their amorous suitors in an indifferent blobish sort of way. For you ladies who find something familiar in this description, please visit Match.com. The females (who else) then hang around guarding the developing eggs in an equally idle fashion until the small fry hatch and float indifferently away.

So this is the story, to the extent we are able to discern; the blobfish is birthed by an inattentive mother and then floats away with its mouth open and continues to do this for mostly the rest of its life, breaking this routine only intermittently when the urge to for some reason restart this boring cycle strikes it. One might suspect that it is likely there is much more to the blobfish than I have reported, but you wouldn’t know it by searching the web. The blobfish does, however, reside generally about half a mile down, so it doesn’t get much press. Most of the blobfish that are observed are inadvertently hauled up in fishermen’s nets, no doubt a rude surprise to both parties.

But let us not snicker too arrogantly at our ugly vertebrate cousin; for he is as much a supreme achievement of nature as are we. Perfectly suited for the inhospitable conditions of enormous pressure and scarce sustenance, he expends virtually no effort, but boasts a evolutionary success record far more ancient than our own. There is no empirical data which give any indication that he lies, murders or uses credit irresponsibly. He lives in balance and harmony with his environment and sustains successive generations without diminishing the wealth or diversity of life on Earth. For all his repellent splendor, he is completely incapable of the depth or scale of ugliness that humans casually take for granted.