Roman Fedortsov is a Russian trawlerman from Murmansk whose phone photos of bizarre animals pulled up in fishing nets have made him one of the best-known amateur nature photographers on social media. His boat targets ordinary commercial fish such as cod, haddock, halibut, redfish and herring in the Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea and the North Atlantic. Because the nets are worked at roughly 300 to 1,000 metres, they also bring up animals that almost nobody ever sees alive.
What makes his pictures so striking is that many of these creatures look nothing like they would in their own habitat. A fish that is perfectly shaped for crushing pressure and darkness can sag, bulge or seem to melt once it reaches the deck. Fedortsov photographs them where they land: in his gloved hand, on a steel sorting table or beside the factory conveyor.
Below is a guided tour of his best-known photos, with the likely identity of each animal, where it normally lives and why it looks the way it does. Where an animal cannot be identified with confidence from the picture, we say so rather than guess.
Who Roman Fedortsov is and how the photos are made
Fedortsov studied fishing technology at a marine university in Murmansk, the large ice-free port on the Kola Peninsula, and has spent close to two decades working on trawlers. On board he is not a deckhand hauling ropes but a supervisor in the fish factory, where the catch is sorted, processed and frozen for delivery. The odd animals he photographs are bycatch that turns up among the commercial fish during processing.
He has said that he started posting the pictures because most people simply have no idea what deep-water animals look like. In 2021 PetaPixel reported that he was shooting with an iPhone 11 Pro Max, mostly in his off-duty hours, and that his accounts had grown to about 620,000 followers on Instagram and 140,000 on Twitter. Some animals arrive alive and are put back in the sea, he explained, but most do not survive the trip to the surface.
That last point matters for anyone looking at the photos. Many "ugly" deep-sea animals are only ugly after a fast climb through hundreds of metres of water, a sudden drop in pressure and a rise in temperature. You are often looking at an injured or dying animal, not its natural shape.
Fish that change shape on the way up
A blobfish-type sculpin
This pink, droopy-faced fish belongs to the family Psychrolutidae, the fathead sculpins popularly called blobfishes. Their bodies are soft and gelatinous with little muscle, which lets them hover just above the seafloor at great depth without spending energy. Brought up in a net, the loose tissue collapses into the famous "sad face", which is why blobfish photos always look like this and never like a living animal at depth.
Redfish with its insides pushed out
The bright orange fish is a redfish of the genus Sebastes, a commercial species also sold as ocean perch or rose fish. Adults of the golden redfish live offshore at about 100 to 1,000 metres across the northern Atlantic, from Norway to Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya. The pink "tongue" is not a tongue at all: redfish have a closed swim bladder, and when they are hauled up quickly the gas inside expands so violently that it can push the stomach out through the mouth and make the eyes bulge. This is barotrauma, the fish version of decompression injury.
A grenadier with dragon eyes
Big lemon-yellow eyes, a large head and a body that tapers into a long thin tail are the marks of a grenadier, also called a rattail. Grenadiers are among the most common fish on the continental slopes of the North Atlantic, where they patrol the bottom for small crustaceans and worms. Fedortsov joked that it looks like a cartoon dragon and that the photo was not edited, which is easy to believe once you know how strange these fish really are.
A dark slope fish in the palms
This slim, dark fish with a pale glassy eye is harder to pin down from the photo alone; it may be one of the many eel-shaped slope dwellers that share these grounds. Its dark skin is typical of fish that live where almost no daylight reaches. Fedortsov called it a scary beauty, and the way the light catches its skin shows why.
Pale strands spilling from a fish's mouth
Fedortsov warned nervous viewers away from this one. The fish appears to be a member of the cod family, and the pale, worm-like strands hanging from its mouth are not something we can identify with certainty from a photo: they may be parasites, or internal tissue forced out by the same pressure change that affects the redfish. Either way, it is a reminder that the animals in these pictures have just been through a brutal journey.
Sharks, chimaeras and fanged hunters
A small deep-water shark
This dark purple shark with a spine in front of its dorsal fin looks like one of the small dogfish or lanternshark species that live on the slopes of the Norwegian Sea. Many of these little sharks glow faintly from light organs on the belly, a trick that helps hide their silhouette from predators looking up from below. They are a regular bycatch of deep trawling.
A baby chimaera
Small enough to sit in a palm, this is a young chimaera, a fish known in English as a ghost shark, ratfish or rabbitfish. Chimaeras have skeletons of cartilage like sharks and rays, but their lineage split from them nearly 400 million years ago. Instead of rows of replaceable teeth they have permanent tooth plates that form a beak, which gives them their rabbit-like face.
A chimaera seen head-on
Shot from the front, an adult chimaera looks like a pale alien with huge black eyes and wing-like pectoral fins. Most living chimaeras are found in deep water, some below 2,000 metres, and several species carry a venomous spine on the front of the dorsal fin for defence. The rabbit fish of the North-east Atlantic, Chimaera monstrosa, is caught as bycatch often enough that some of its populations are declining.
Fangs for a dark world
Needle-like fangs too long to fit inside the mouth suggest a viperfish or a related dragonfish. These predators live in the open water of the deep ocean, where meals are rare, so their jaws are built to grab and hold almost anything that comes close. In life they are usually small; the close-up makes this one look far larger than it is.
Lumpsuckers, eelpouts and eggs
A blue-green lumpsucker
The common lumpsucker, Cyclopterus lumpus, is a round, bumpy fish whose pelvic fins have turned into a sucker on the belly that lets it cling to rocks. Fedortsov pointed out its role on salmon farms in Norway and Scotland, and he was right: farmers stock lumpsuckers as "cleaner fish" that pick sea lice off salmon. The species is also fished for its roe in Norway, Iceland, Greenland and Canada.
Four spiny lumpsuckers
These little round fish covered in knobbly spines are spiny lumpsuckers of the genus Eumicrotremus, probably the Atlantic spiny lumpsucker. They are relatives of the bigger common lumpsucker and use the same belly sucker to hold on to the seabed. Lined up on the table with their mouths open, they really do look like a little team.
A row of eelpouts
The mottled, thick-lipped fish that reminded Fedortsov of dwarves from The Lord of the Rings look like eelpouts, bottom fish of cold northern seas with long bodies and broad heads. Several Arctic eelpouts carry a net-like pattern of dark lines like these. They live on soft mud and feed on worms, clams and small crustaceans.
Eyes inside the eggs
This is a mass of fish eggs late enough in development that the embryos' dark eyes show through the shells, which is why each egg seems to stare back. Many cold-water fish, including lumpsuckers, lay sticky clumps of eggs that stay together like this. Fedortsov asked viewers to look into those sad eyes, and once you notice them it is hard to stop.
Stars, cucumbers and crabs from the seabed
A basket star
The tangle of coiled arms belongs to a basket star, most likely of the genus Gorgonocephalus, a relative of starfish and brittle stars. Five arms grow from the central disc and fork again and again into fine branches. In the water it climbs onto a raised perch and spreads those branches like a net, curling them around krill and other small crustaceans that drift past.
A brown psolus sea cucumber
Fedortsov named these himself: Psolus phantapus, the brown psolus. It is a sea cucumber of the Arctic and Atlantic that lives at depths of about 4 to 500 metres, sitting on the seafloor on a flat sole lined with tube feet. It feeds by spreading ten bushy orange tentacles to catch particles from the water, and the pink one in the middle has its feeding end partly extended.
A sea cucumber "bouquet" for 8 March
Fedortsov posted this orange sea cucumber with flower-like red tentacles to greet women on International Women's Day, which is widely celebrated in Russia on 8 March. It resembles the orange-footed sea cucumbers common in the cold North Atlantic. The "petals" are its feeding tentacles, which it pushes out to sweep food from the water.
A spiny king crab
This small orange crab bristling with spines looks like a young king crab, possibly the Norway king crab, Lithodes maja. Its spines discourage fish and octopus from eating it while it is still small. It is a cousin of the much larger red king crab, which was introduced into the Barents Sea by Soviet scientists and is now fished there.
A crab's face up close
Seen at close range, the mouthparts of a crab look like a set of stacked plates and tiny pincers, with the stalked eyes perched above. Those mouthparts shred food into small pieces before it is swallowed. A tight crop like this turns an ordinary bycatch crab into something that looks like a sci-fi creature.
The mystery shell
The rounded, ridged object with an orange seam, which Fedortsov captioned with a knock-knock style joke, is one of his most shared pictures and also one of the hardest to identify. It appears to be an invertebrate such as a large sea squirt or another soft-bodied seabed animal, but the photo alone does not settle it. It is a good example of how much of the deep seafloor still surprises even the people who fish it for a living.
Three photos that did not come from the deep
Not every popular picture from Fedortsov's feed shows an Arctic trawl catch, and a few of them are worth separating out.
Pufferfish on the sand
These two striped pufferfish are lying on a sandy beach, not on a trawler deck. Pufferfish of this kind are warm-water reef fish, so the photos were almost certainly taken on a trip south rather than in the Barents Sea. Like all puffers, they can inflate with water when threatened, and many species carry the powerful toxin tetrodotoxin.
A remora's sucking disc
The upper photo shows the ridged oval disc on top of a remora's head; the lower one shows the fish from the side. The disc is a dorsal fin that evolved into a suction pad, with slat-like ridges that let the remora grip sharks, rays, turtles and whales and ride along. Remoras live mainly in warm open seas, so this one probably came from the Atlantic leg of a voyage.
Alligator gars in an aquarium
The long-snouted fish Fedortsov called a "shell pike" (a translation of the Russian name for gars) are alligator gars, photographed through aquarium glass. They are freshwater fish of the southern United States and Mexico, protected by bony, enamel-coated scales, and adults commonly reach about 1.8 metres. They can live for many decades, which makes them popular in big public aquariums.
Why deep-sea animals look so strange
Below a few hundred metres there is little or no sunlight, the water is near freezing, and the pressure rises by about one atmosphere every ten metres. Food mostly arrives as a slow fall of dead material from above. Animals adapt by saving energy: soft watery bodies instead of heavy muscle, huge eyes to catch faint light, large mouths and teeth to grab rare prey, and dark or red colouring that is invisible where red light never reaches.
Those same adaptations are what make the animals look shocking on deck. Gas-filled swim bladders expand, jelly-like tissue loses its support, and eyes can bulge. So when a deep-sea fish is called "the ugliest animal in the world", it is worth remembering that you are usually seeing it at its worst.
The photos also show how much life deep trawling disturbs beyond the target catch. Bycatch of slow-growing, late-maturing species such as chimaeras and redfish is one reason scientists track these populations closely. If you want to see deep-sea animals in better shape, research institutes and aquariums publish footage filmed by remotely operated vehicles at depth, which shows the same species hovering, swimming and feeding normally.
Sources: Photographs by Roman Fedortsov (Instagram, Twitter); Bored Panda, which first shared this selection; PetaPixel, 18 May 2021; Wikipedia on chimaeras, lumpsuckers, golden redfish, barotrauma, Psolus phantapus, Gorgonocephalus, remoras, alligator gar and blobfishes.
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