WONDERS OF THE DEEP: FROM SUBLIME TO… THE OTHER THING

It’s a statistically proven fact (and not, in any way, a ‘post-truth’ proposition) that no one has ever had a bad thing to say about seahorses. Indeed, some love them too much and consume them – see HERE for threats to seahorse populations in some areas of the world. 

Sometimes they are easy to see. The header image shows an orange seahorse curling its tail round green weed on pink coral – hard to miss. Yet sometimes it may be quite difficult to see the little creatures against their chosen background.

These guys are, I think, for their size among the most sublime of all underwater creatures. I use the word in the strict historical sense “of very great excellence or beauty, exalted, awe-inspiring, majestic, magnificent, glorious.” Not just to mean “nice”. 

In contrast, there are some undersea creatures that inspire… not awe exactly, but maybe an amused respect that so wonderful and bizarre a creature can exist in our oceans, in some cases only a few feet below the surface. Here are two examples of what I mean.

This is a BATFISH. It was an early shoo-in for my “WTF? (What’s that Fish?)” series, and you can read all about them and their ways HERE. Of all the creatures I have featured on this blog, this is by some distance the oddest…

…except for its companion in oddness, the FROGFISH. This was next in the WTF? series, and the creature is, if anything, even stranger. You can read all about these critters HERE, where you will learn inter alia about their superpowers – any one of which you might like to have yourself. There are plenty of photos, and videos too.

FROGFISH SUPERPOWERS

• Invisibility Cloak
• Irresistible (and, to their prey, Fatal) Attraction
• Buoyancy Control
• Shapeshifting

I do not court controversy, recognising that people following this site, or maybe stumbling across it by mistake and lingering, reach their views on natural history from different directions. But these strange and fascinating species exist and thrive in their own particular and ingenious ways – it doesn’t really matter how or why they are as they are. The bats and the frogs are high in the list of the least conventional of undersea creatures, and if they are not exactly sublime in a seahorse sense, can we just agree that they are awesome?