In December, a colleague at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration passed Frable another tip out of San Diego. “I didn’t get any information, just ‘There’s this weird fish-can you identify it?’ ” But, by the time he went to check it out, it had been scavenged or had washed back out to sea. “Fast-forward to November, and I get an e-mail from a local news station.” Another Pacific footballfish had washed up, this time in San Diego. “It was pretty exciting to see such a rare anglerfish,” Ben Frable, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said. The last time a Pacific footballfish had been collected in California was in 2001. The ichthyology world was stoked about Estes’s find. (The males are tiny, lightless, possibly toothless, and even harder to find.) Its close cousins are the seadevils (spiny, prickly, warty) more distantly, it’s related to the frogfish, the batfish, and the sea toad. The creature was a female Pacific footballfish, an exceedingly rare deep-sea anglerfish that lives thousands of feet underwater, in the midnight zone, and sports a bioluminescent lure that it uses to attract prey. It’s the monster-looking fish that chased Nemo around,’ ” Estes recalled. When Estes showed his family some pictures he had taken, his daughter, who was four when “Finding Nemo” came out, recognized the creature right away. Later, he learned that the mouth is designed to swallow prey whole. ![]() “Its mouth just opened really wide, a slow eeer,” Estes said, making the sound of a door opening on creaky hinges. He adjusted the crazy-looking head tassel. ![]() ![]() And that thing that was hanging off its head, it looked pretty crazy. “Its mouth had some teeth you could almost see through. “It looked like a deflated black balloon that had thorns on it,” he said. One morning in May, Ben Estes, a retired Hollywood grip (“Terminator,” “True Lies”) and a lifelong surf caster, was walking on the beach in Orange County when he came upon something weird. A Pacific footballfish Illustration by João Fazenda
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