This Faceless Fish Found Off The Coast Of Australia Will Haunt You

I think some of us are still freaked out by that massive whale carcass that washed ashore in Indonesia. We definitely don't need a new creature to plague my nightmares. But it appears that Museums Victoria has other plans.

Australian scientists have been on a two-month long journey into waters off the east coast to see what's beneath the surface and there are some very creepy things down there.

Down in those cold, dark, depths they managed to find an interesting looking fish with nostrils and a mouth, but no face.

No goddamn face.

Faceless Fish

Credit: Twitter/Museums Victoria

Apparently, the fish is actually a cusk eel. The more you know.

Dianne Bray has described meeting the creepy thing in a blog: "By faceless, I mean it had NO EYES - NOTHING - not even tiny spots or modified areas indicating eyes beneath the skin. It came from 4,000 metres below the surface, where pressures are huge, the water is a mere 1⁰C, and the seafloor landscape is pretty barren!

"Everyone was amazed. We fishos thought we'd hit the jackpot, especially as we had no idea what is was - some sort of cusk eel, kind of..

"Tissue samples were taken (for genetic analyses) and images were emailed to experts who work on weird abyssal fishes. We even conjured up possible new scientific names!"

But it's not the only thing that researchers have found down there.

Dianne says that they've seen a kind of chimaera which whizzed past on their video camera as well as fish with photosensitive plates on their heads.

"Although very little is known about this strange fish without a face, it does have eyes - which are apparently visible well beneath the skin in smaller specimens. I doubt they'd be of much use though," wrote Dianne.

Apparently the fish has been found in the Arabian Sea, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Japan and Hawaii, but these Australian researchers believe this capture is the biggest one yet.

The Aussie team are not the only ones checking out what is lurking down there.

Roman Fedorstov, a Russian deep sea fisherman, tweets images of creatures he's caught on his travels.

He works on a fishing trawler in Murmansk, Russia, according to The Moscow Times, but you'd be forgiven for thinking that some of his catches are from the set of Alien.

When you close your eyes tonight, try and not dream of the faceless fish.

Topics: Fish

Stewart Perrie

Stewart Perrie is a Trending Journalist at LADbible. His first job was as a newsreader and journalist at the award winning Sydney radio station, Macquarie Radio. He was solely responsible for the content broadcast on multiple stations across Australia when the MH17, Germanwings and AirAsia disasters unfolded. Stewart has covered the conflict in Syria for LADbible, interviewing a doctor on the front line, and has contributed to the hugely successful UOKM8 campaign.

@stewartperrie