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b'This week we\'ll learn about five mystery fish that William Beebe spotted from his bathysphere in the early 1930s...and which have never been seen again. Thanks to Page for suggesting deep-sea fish!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nHow some superblack fish disappear into the darkness of the deep sea\\n\\nThe Fine Art of Exploration\\n\\nFurther listening:\\n\\n99% Invisible "Bathysphere"\\n\\nThe Gulper Eel unlocked patreon episode\\n\\nThese two guys crammed themselves into that little bathysphere together. Sometimes they got seasick and puked in there. Also, they didn\'t like each other very much:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe Pacific blackdragon is hard to photograph because it\'s SUPERBLACK:\\n\\n \\n\\nA larval blackdragon. Those eyestalks!\\n\\n\\n\\nA painting (by Else Bostelmann) of Bathysphaera intacta (left) and an illustration from Beebe\'s book Half Mile Down:\\n\\n \\n\\nThe pallid sailfish, also painted by Bostelmann:\\n\\n\\n\\nA (dead) stoplight loosejaw. Tear your surprised eyeballs away from its weird jaws and compare its tail to the pallid sailfish\'s:\\n\\n\\n\\nA model of a loosejaw (taken from this site) to give you a better idea of what it looks like when alive. Close-up of the extraordinary jaws (seen from underneath) is on the right:\\n\\n \\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nThis week we\\u2019re going to descend metaphorically into the depths of the ocean and learn about some mystery fish spotted once from a bathysphere by famous naturalist William Beebe and never seen again. Deep-sea fish is a suggestion by Page, so thank you, Page, for a fascinating and creepy addition to monster month.\\n\\nWilliam Beebe was an American naturalist born in 1877 who lived until 1962, which is amazing considering he made repeated dives into the deep sea in the very first bathysphere in the early 1930s. We talked about bathyspheres way back in episode 27--you know, the one where I scream about them imploding and kind of freak out a little. Even today descending into the deep sea is dangerous, and a hundred years ago it was way way way more dangerous.\\n\\nBeebe was an early conservationist who urged other scientists to stop shooting so many animals. Back then if you wanted to study an animal, you just went out and killed as many of them as you could find. Beebe pointed out the obvious, that this was wasteful and didn\\u2019t provide nearly as much information as careful observation of living animals in the wild. He also pioneered the study of ecosystems, how animals fit into their environment and interact with it and each other.\\n\\nWhile Beebe mostly studied birds, he was also interested in underwater animals. Really, he seems to have been interested in everything. He studied birds all over the world, was a good taxidermist, and especially liked to study ocean life by dredging small animals up from the bottom and examining them. He survived a plane crash, was nearly killed by an erupting volcano he was observing, and fought in WWI. Once when he broke his leg during an expedition and had to remain immobilized, he had his bed carried outside every day so he could make observations of the local animals as they grew used to his presence.\\n\\nIn the 1920s, during an expedition to the Galapagos Islands, he started studying marine animals more closely. First he just dangled from a rope over the surface of the ocean, which was attached to a ship\\u2019s boom, but eventually he tried using a diving helmet. This was so successful that he started thinking about building a vessel that could withstand the pressures of the deep sea.\\n\\nWith the help of engineer Otis Barton, the world\\u2019s first bathysphere was invented and Barton and Beebe conducted dozens of descents in Bermuda, especially off the coast of Nonsuch Island. The bathysphere had two little windows and a single light that shone through one of the windows, illuminating the outside just enough to see fish and other animals. The bathysphere couldn\\u2019t descend all that deeply,'