Don’t hate on deep-sea critters. They've got to be weird to survive.

You can count on the deep ocean to spawn surreal creatures that, depending on your point of view, look very beautiful or very unnerving.

A deep-sea fisherman in Murmansk, Russia, has taken to sharing some of his most striking catches on Twitter. The animals featured in Roman Fedortsov’s pictures have recently inspired comparisons to the movie Alien and Jim Henson’s fantastical creations.



But don't take these fish at face value. Some of them may actually be a bit deformed in the pictures because their swim bladders—the gas-filled organ that helps them move up and down through the water—expanded at surface pressure, distending their bellies. “Fishes with swim bladders become distorted when brought up to the surface if they live at depth, and that certainly appears to be the case here,” Paul Snelgrove, a marine biologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, told Popular Science in an email.

Other stars of Fedortsov’s Twitter feed don’t use swim bladders to control their buoyancy, so they may have changed less as they were brought up from the ocean’s depths. Let’s face it, though—all of these guys are pretty weird looking, regardless of the state of their swim bladder.

But that’s because they’ve adapted to live under very different conditions than their surface-dwelling kin. The deep sea is cold and dark. The pressure is immense, and meals are hard to come by. Some of the very features that make deep-sea critters appear bizarre to us actually help them survive in this extreme environment.

Many have big eyes to capture every scrap of light. Others sport lean bodies that persist when food is scarce. Down on the seafloor, spindly legs and light frames help animals sit without sinking into the soft, muddy bottom, Snelgrove says.

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