41 Strange

This is a little bit misleading. Psychrolutes marcidus has no real skeleton & it's flesh is more like gelatin, with only enough muscle to eat, move gills and catch prey. The pics are more like "in vs out of water", not necessarily depth vs surface, although that does kill them.

So even if they were in shallow water, they would appear as they do in the left picture?

Mostly, yes. Their gooey flesh is slightly buoyant so it more or less floats in a neutral way in water instead of sagging like when out of the water.

Wait, we've been making fun of this fish for years due to the abuse we did to it before taking the picture? Holy cow do I feel like garbage.

Hugely sad. Imagine what we would look like dragged to that depth of the ocean.

SQUISHED

In other words we're shithouses who inflict tragedy and pain on others... Hmmm who knew.. No really, I hate us.

So is that what happened to Ted Cruz?

It’s actually due to being that far below sea level there’s so much pressure keeping its body together, but when you lift multiple atmospheres of pressure off of the fish by bringing it to the surface, the pressure keeping it together is no longer there. not because of fishermen

If anything, a researcher brought it up to the surface, I don’t know of any fish that we eat/commercially fished that are that deep in the ocean.

This just makes me sad.