Blobfish

Damnnations! My Winston Churchill bust has melted … oh no it’s just blobfish.

I swear I will throw a wobbly if anyone does another trifle joke

This chap can be found being a trifle curmudgeonly deep in the abyss around the coast of Australia. What is more he is made almost entirely of jelly… yes really. Though that doesn’t seem to have cheered him up, and it should be duly noted that he really doesn’t go down that well with ice cream at parties.

One of the problems with living in water is that it’s very hard to stay where you are. If you are a little bit heavier than water you will sink, and if you are bit lighter you will float up towards the surface. Of course having to fight against this all the time can be a bit of a bugger, so fish have evolved bladders full of air to help them retain a neutral-buoyancy. The problem is that gas-filled organs aren’t really the best idea under the immense pressures in the abyss and so the blobfish has evolved into a… well a blob of jelly. A blob of jelly that is in fact around about the same density as water, which means that he doesn’t have to use up any energy if he doesn’t need to. Which is handy as the blobfish doesn’t get to eat much as he relies on infrequent scraps, from the life-rich upper-ocean, that happen to drift past his nose.

A bally grouchy and lazy blob of jelly he may be, he has however evolved rather neatly to fit his ecological niche. Although this chap isn’t going to woo himself into the upper echelons of Parisian society, at least not after last time, he doesn’t look half as dreadful when he’s in his natural surrounds.