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b"The Gulf of California, AKA the Sea of Cortez, is home to thousands upon thousands of animals, many of them not found anywhere else in the world. New research expeditions in its deep-sea fissures and trenches have turned up some amazing new animals too. Let's take a look at a few of them!\\n\\nThanks to Hally for this week's topic suggestion!\\n\\nThe lollipop catshark sounds cuter than it is:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe black brotula:\\n\\n\\n\\nA super creepy grenadier fish. Look at those EYES:\\n\\n\\n\\nA type of batfish. It uses its stiff fins to walk around on the bottom of the ocean:\\n\\n\\n\\nSome beautiful hydrothermal chimneys:\\n\\n\\n\\nGiant tube worms:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nIt\\u2019s been a while since we did a deep-sea episode. This week let\\u2019s find out about some strange fish discovered in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico. Thanks to Hally for the suggestion!\\n\\nThe Gulf of California, also called the Sea of Cortez, is the stretch of water between mainland Mexico and the Baja peninsula. Researchers estimate it started forming over 5 million years ago when tectonic forces separated the strip of land now called Baja peninsula or Baja California from the mainland. It\\u2019s still attached to the mainland at its northern edge, where the Colorado River empties into the gulf. The sea is about 700 miles wide, or over 1100 km.\\n\\nBecause the gulf was formed by tectonic forces and undersea volcanos, parts of it are extremely deep\\u2014more than 12,500 feet deep in places, or 3,800 meters. It\\u2019s full of islands, nearly 1,000 of them, a few of them quite large and some just tiny, some of them volcanic and some not. And it\\u2019s rich in ocean life, with many animals found in the Gulf of California that live nowhere else in the world.\\n\\nFor instance, the lollipop catshark! What a cute name. It probably plays ukulele and its best friend plays the xylophone. They should start a band!\\n\\nThe lollipop catshark is actually not super cute, although it is pretty awesome. It\\u2019s a small shark, only about 11 inches long, or 28 cm, and it has pinkish gray skin that\\u2019s almost gelatinous in texture, although it also has tiny spiky denticles, especially on its back. It gets the name lollipop from its shape. It has a broad head with large gills, but its body tapers to a slender tail so that it\\u2019s sort of shaped like a tadpole. Not really lollipop shaped, frankly. Babies are born live instead of hatching from eggs, with a female giving birth to two babies at a time. It eats crustaceans and fish.\\n\\nThe reason the lollipop catshark has such big gills is that it lives at the bottom of the ocean where there\\u2019s not much oxygen. The Gulf of California is especially oxygen-poor in its deepest areas, so when a team of scientists sent a submersible to the deepest parts of the gulf in 2015, they didn\\u2019t expect to find that many fish or other animals. But not only were there a lot of lollipop catsharks, there were lots of other animals too.\\n\\nThe submersible found the most fish in a part of the gulf called the Carralvo Trough, which is nearly 3,300 feet deep, or 1,000 meters. A few years before, a submersible had discovered the bodies of dozens of dead squid in the trough, and researchers determined that the squid were all females that had laid eggs and then died and sunk to the bottom. The dead squid are usually eaten by scavengers within 24 hours of dying, including crabs and sea stars, brittle stars, and acorn worms, as well as small bottom-dwelling sharks like the lollipop catshark. So it was good timing that the submersible saw so many of them at once.\\n\\nAnother deep-sea animal found in the Gulf of California is the cusk eel. There are lots of species of cusk eel that live throughout the world\\u2019s oceans and even some fresh water, and despite the name, cusk eels are fish, not eels. They\\u2019re related to cod, although not closely. They live on the bottom of the ocean, usually in shallow water,"