Everyone knows now that the deep sea has a monopoly on strange fish. There is the uncanny inflation of the gulper eel, the peeled-grape eyes of the barreleye, and the eternal frown of the sea toad. These spooky fish’s great and insurmountable distance from us might offer some reassurance that we are not likely to encounter them in the wild, at least not while either of us is alive. But the world’s weirdest-looking fish, at least in my estimation, does not live in the deep sea. The red-lipped batfish trudges in the sludge near the Galápagos Islands, no deeper than 250 feet, which means it is a fish that people are able to encounter in the wild, perhaps even on a special vacation. I sometimes imagine what it would be like to see a red-lipped batfish in the wild without prior knowledge of the species. I have known about the red-lipped batfish for at least a decade now, and each time I see a photo of the fish I still feel the need to blink, to remember that the fish is, indeed, real, to ask myself for the millionth time, What the hell is going on with that fish?
Let me show you what I mean.
My question, more specifically, is why does the red-lipped batfish looks like that? Why does it have such a distinct and bold red lip, a feature that seems so eerily human? Why, as a fish, does it have two legs? To that matter, why do its fins have elbows? Why does it have little white hairs protruding from its lips and a horn protruding from the center of its face? To sum it up, what kind of anatomical mayhem is happening over here?
The red-lipped batfish is a bit of an internet celebrity, a reputation that is certainly earned. It has garnered little profiles in the likes of The Guardian, the BBC, and the Verge. Although these stories extol the fish’s bizarro looks, they do little to explain them. I wanted to see if I could get real answers to my important questions.
The reason behind these stories’ superficial engagement became clear when I trawled through Google Scholar without finding any researchers who appeared to be experts on the red-lipped batfish. The species was first described in 1958 in the journal Copeia by the ichthyologist Carl Leavitt Hubbs, who has been dead for nearly 50 years and therefore could not respond to my email. Although Hubbs’s paper describes the red-lipped batfish in great detail, it does not explain why it looks like that. (It does share that one of the first specimens was collected on a tuna clipper called the Chicken O’ The Sea.)
With no red-lipped batfish specialists out there, I took a different tack. Although the red-lipped batfish does not live in the deep sea, it is technically an anglerfish, meaning a fish in the order Lophiiformes. The quintessential deep-sea angler looks like the one of your imagination—black and prune-like with a toothy, gaping maw. But some anglers have less ominous expressions, such as the morose sea toad, the surprised frogfish, the suspicious goosefish, and the indignant batfish (not to be confused with the inquisitive, reef-dwelling batfish). So I reached out to Elizabeth Santos, a researcher at Ohio State University who studies the diversification of fish, with a particular interest in how anglerfishes look the way they do.
Santos told me that, technically speaking, batfishes look just as weird as the other types of anglerfishes. All except the deep-sea anglers have “feet” that are modified pelvic fins that help the fish balance and take off from the seafloor. “Batfish look like that because all Lophiiformes look like that in some capacity,” she wrote in an email. “This implies that ‘being weird’ evolved long before the batfish, at the common ancestor of all Lophiiformes.” The anglerfishes’ closest relatives include the pufferfishes and sunfishes, other certifiably freaky fish. Although the more famous anglerfishes dangle their lure like a fishing rod, the batfish’s lure hides under its unicorn-like horn, where it can protrude from the skull like a slide whistle.
But Santos did offer one concrete hypothesis behind the red-lipped batfish’s whole deal. All of the anglerfishes, as well as pufferfishes and sunfishes, have restricted gill openings. “There is some evidence that when your gill openings become small holes, it frees up the rest of the body to evolve in new ways,” she said. Although this doesn’t explain why the batfish looks crazy, it might explain the how.
I also emailed the scientist who knows more about anglerfish than anyone else in the world, the renowned researcher and author of Oceanic Anglerfishes, Ted Pietsch. Pietsch told me he knew little about batfishes, but he directed me to the world’s expert on batfishes, Hans Ho at the National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium in Checheng, Taiwan. Ho, who was kind enough to answer my questions over email, offered the exact kind of batfish insights that I craved with none of my uncharitable aesthetic judgment. When I asked Ho why the red-lipped batfish has red lips, he responded simply: “It is the beauty of nature.”
Even Ho does not know why the lips are such a striking scarlet red. He pointed out that other fishes have blue, orange, yellow, and white lips. I asked if the red-lipped batfish’s lips are lips in the same way our lips are lips. He said technically the fish’s lips are the fleshy part of their jaws, but they cannot close the same way our lips do. Ho told me that the white growths on the red-lipped batfish’s face are cirri, hair-like structures used for sensory purposes or camouflage.
When I asked Ho why the red-lipped batfish had feet, and, by extension, felt the need to walk, he told me that anglerfishes likely evolved to swim in the water column and only later returned to the ground. The batfish tend to use their “arms” and “legs” to move, although they can swim as needed. “Some said that they walk and save the energy, and I agree,” he said. And once again, he pushed back against my framing of the batfish as unusually weird, adding that there are weirder fishes with weirder fins out there. “Flatfishes are even more weird to me,” he added.
I asked Ho what else we know about the red-lipped batfish. How long does it live? How does it mate? How does it spend its day? Unfortunately, he told me, scientists know little about the species’ natural history. But this might be better for the batfish, at least on an individual level. “If we want to know the reproduction or age, we will need to kill several hundreds of various-sized individuals, which probably is not what we want to do,” he said. But scientists do know that batfishes eat the creatures dwelling on the seafloor, such as crabs both true and false, shrimps, sea slugs, snails, clams, worms, and echinoderms like sea urchins. “In one case, they eat a snake eel,” Ho said, referring to a large kind of burrowing eel. “That is incredible.”
When Ho first learned of the red-lipped batfish, he was initially attracted to its species name—Ogcocephalus darwini—and that it was named for Darwin. “Then, of course, the beautiful red lips,” he said. “They are not weird to me.”
Ho also found it meaningful that the red-lipped batfish was described by Hubbs, who he sees as the modern founder of fish taxonomy in America. Hubbs “kind of established the methods to [describe] such special kind of fishes,” Ho said. After Hubbs came the American ichthyologist Margaret Bradbury, who became the world expert on this obscure group of fishes before retiring in 1994. In the early 2000s, Ho decided to write his doctoral dissertation on batfishes. When he visited Bradbury in 2005, she shared her data sheets and photos of the batfishes she had studied over the years. “These photos and data … helped me a lot to be familiar with most species, and prevent many mistakes,” Ho shared in an obituary for Bradbury published in Copeia.
Ho visited Bradbury two more times and shared photos he’d taken of batfishes from Taiwan and museums around the world. The two discussed the taxonomy of a very flat subset of the batfishes called the pancake batfishes. The two had another batfish call when Bradbury moved into a retirement facility in Pacific Grove. “Maybe we are the only two [to] understand what I was talking about,” Ho said. When Bradbury passed in 2010, Ho stepped into her shoes as the world’s leading batfish expert. In 2013, Ho named a Tanzanian species of batfish Malthopsis bradburyae after Bradbury, “in recognition of her great
contribution to our knowledge of batfishes, and her friendship.” M. bradburyae, it goes without saying, also looks really weird.