Scientists have stumbled upon the “top predator” in the deep sea and named it after the elite sumo wrestlers

One sunny winter day in 2016 found marine biologist Yoshihiro Fujiwara anchored off the coast of central Japan, measuring eel knives, when a log suddenly burst aboard the ship. The Shonan Maru crew had just landed a large, bizarre-looking fish.

“Wow! We have a coelacanth!” they joked when they picked up a specimen so large that it evoked the legendary “living fossil” species found only in Africa and Indonesia.

Fujiwara, whose specialty is whaling communities – the rich ecosystems that spring around and feed on whale carcasses – have been equally delighted and skeptical.

“It was exciting,” he told CBS News. “But this is a very well-studied bay.”

Really. Researchers have been building a taxonomy of specimens in Suruga, the deepest bay in Japan since the 19th century.

The area is also one of the most fished in the world. Surely, Fujiwara thought, someone had seen this colossal creature before.

Amazingly, no one had. Fujiwara and his team at the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) checked the reference books and consulted with colleagues around the world before concluding the spear-shaped creature with deep purple hues. it was indeed a discovery of good faith.

Three other monster fish were allegedly hung that year, quickly preserved in formaldehyde or frozen for further examination in the laboratory.

Dissection, CT scans and other analyzes located the specimen in alepocephaly family, a deep species distributed throughout the world and popularly known as “tricksters”, for the heads and gill coverings without scale. But unlike his much smaller relatives, who have an average length of just 14 inches, this was a beast: at 55 inches long and 55 pounds, he was the size and weight of a small child.

Fujiwara and his team decided to call the new species “yokozuna slickhead”, after the first rank in sumo wrestling.

“I couldn’t believe it,” biologist Jan Yde Poulsen, a research associate at the Australian Museum and an authority on cunning, told CBS News at his base in Denmark.

Poulsen, who co-authored a paper in January with the JAMSTEC team on the slick head at yokozuna, was also dubious when he received the first photo from Fujiwara’s team.

“It’s a very grainy picture, almost like when you see a picture of the Loch Ness monster,” he said. “The fact that you find a new species that weighs 25 kilograms is just incredible.”

Despite its deep hostile hostility, its black, black habitat was not only large, but strong. While other slickhead species swallow plankton and weak swimmers, such as jellyfish, DNA examination of the stomach contents of the giant fish showed that it hunted other fish, perhaps supplementing its diet by elimination.

Unlike the other 100 species of traps known to the world, the yokozuna is a vigorous swimmer, possibly able to cover long distances, as evidenced by a few seconds of rare videos captured with a camera with baits at a depth of almost 8,500 feet.

The mouth of Slickhead’s “wide gap” hosts several rows of teeth, evoking an alien monster. Fujiwara’s team tried to count the densely packed fangs and their strictly unofficial conclusion: “80 to 100” teeth in these jaws.

Physical attributes, in addition to biochemical analysis, identified the slick head yokozuna as a peak predator – the deep version of a lion or killer whale.

“We have so many dives all over the world,” Fujiwara said. “But it’s rare to see a top predator.”

The well-equipped marine agency has a number of sophisticated submarines and other depth exploration vehicles, “but they are very noisy and use strong light,” Fujiwara said. “Most top predators are very active, so they can easily escape from our submarine.”

His team determined that the development of specially made long lines – long enough to reach the bottom of the ocean, equipped with hundreds of hooks lured by mackerel – would be more efficient, although time consuming. It takes up to four hours to implement these ultra-long lines, which are left in the water overnight.

While hundreds of new species of fish are identified each year, the hard-to-reach deep sea still holds many mysteries.

“We have no idea what’s down there,” Fujiwara said.