Barreleye

[daniel89]

I've been wondering is it possible to buy a barreleye fish, and if so where would i even begin to finding someone or somewhere with one?

They are a deep water fish, but they are only a few inchs long. They steal there food from jelly fish. There eyes are on top of there head (look at my display picture) the two green spots is it eyes, it has a clear liquid forhead which allows it to swim up into the jelly with out its eyes being stung. it rolls its eyes straight up and look for shadows of jellyfish or other prey and when spotted it rolls its eyes back forwards and swims up and steals the food from the jellyfish or takes it prey.

[predator 1]

Forget it, those fish are bathypelagic. They thrive at depths of 2,500 metres, they would not survive the decompression of being brought to the surface, let alone being kept in an aquarium. Unless of course you have found a way of replicating those pressures in your home/office.

[daniel89]

thanks for shooting me down :( anybody else wanna tune in also like on ways to pressurize your house lol or fish tank ;)

[FMarini]

I think the fish would live at surface pressure-if decompressed properly. Just not sure for how long

What i dont know is
a)how you get a fish, B)-if you could get a fish-could you afford a 500K fish (since it will require a bathysphere trip to collect one), and c) what would you feed it-are the jelly fish it steals food from required

Somethings, like this fish are best left to watch on a Natl Geographic channel, in HD of course

[HASBRO]

I have one, he eats nls pellets and flakes.;)

[JHemdal]

The picture on your avatar looks like the images taken by the Monterey Bay Aquarium's research institute. If so, that was taken at only at 750 meters, and fishbase seems to indicate that these fish come closer to the surface than that (probably at night).

They may not need to be decompressed - depends if they are physotomus or physoclistus. The former have a tube connecting the gas bladder to the mouth. The fish you see with their eyes bugged out when brought to the surface are physiclistus, they don't have that tube, so the pressure can't bleed off. More importantly, to bring fish up from depth you need to capture them without damage (many deep sea fish have soft bodies) and then you need to protect them from light and temperature change. Finally, Monterey discovered that oxygen actually kills some of these creatures, so they needed to shoot nitrogen gas into the water to keep the dissolved oxygen levels low enough.

So can you get one? No - but watch the Monterey Bay Aquarium - they have a long history of researching a new species (tuna, white shark, etc.) and then once they've learned enough, they try them on exhibit. They've already done a temporary deep sea exhibit and didn't have this species, so they may have found that they are not suitable for capture....

I wrote an article on Deep Sea isopods (Bathynomus giganteus) for TFH magazine a number of years ago - they come from roughly the same depth, and are kept by public aquariums. They are collected by a firm that also collects for pet stores, so it seems to me that a home aquarists with deep pockets could get a truly deep sea animal for their home - figure on $1200 for the isopod, then you need a tank with a chiller....fun to dream though!


Jay