For seven weeks Dan Clem was a fisheries observer aboard a swordfish longliner and witnessed pelagic richness and weirdness.
But there were also freak events: a swordfish that had football-size, foul-smelling tumors in its abdomen; a juvenile turtle that was not itself hooked by the longline gear but was taking shelter in a wad of derelict trawl net and algae that had been snagged by several of the hooks; a weird, iridescent fish from the abyss that popped out of the mouth of a lancetfish, a species that spends most of its time in the darkest parts of the ocean but rises at night to feed.
Weirdest of all, and by far the most improbable, was the 600-pound swordfish that came aboard with a curved sword.
LINK (via: Nautilus)
