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b"This week we learn more about the blobfish thanks to Matilde's suggestion, and we'll also learn about a primitive rabbit.\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nIn Defense of the Blobfish: Why the 'World's Ugliest Animal' Isn't as Ugly as You Think It Is\\n\\nA rare rabbit plays an important ecological role by spreading seeds\\n\\nThe Amami Rabbit: A Living Fossil in the Wilds of Amami \\u014cshima [amazing photos in this article!]\\n\\nThe blobfish as we usually see it:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe blobfish as it looks when it's in its deep-sea home:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe Amami rabbit is so so so round:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n This week we\\u2019re going to learn a little more about the blobfish, which is Matilde\\u2019s suggestion, and we\\u2019ll also talk about an unusual primitive rabbit that\\u2019s still alive today.\\nWe talked about the blobfish briefly in episode 231. The blobfish lives on the sea floor in deep water near Australia and New Zealand. It grows about a foot long at most, or 30 cm, and has weak muscles and a weak skeleton, but it doesn\\u2019t need to be any stronger since the intense pressure of the water presses in around the fish all the time. Its gelatinous flesh is slightly less dense than the water around it, which means it can float just above the sea floor without much effort, just drifting along, giving its tail and broad fins a little flap every so often. It eats whatever detritus floats down from far above, although it also really likes to eat small crustaceans that live on the sea floor.\\nBut wait, you may be thinking, I\\u2019ve seen pictures of the blobfish and it looks like a pinkish blob with a cartoony frown and a droopy nose. Is that blobfish a different one from the one I just described?\\nNo! The trouble is that the blobfish lives in really deep water, up to 4,000 feet below the surface, or 1200 meters. That means that there\\u2019s up to 4,000 feet of water above the fish, and if you\\u2019ve ever had to carry a bucket of water more than a few steps, you\\u2019ll know that water is really heavy. So the blobfish has 4,000 feet of water pressing on it from all directions. This is naturally called water pressure, and at the depths where the blobfish lives, it\\u2019s 120 times higher than water pressure in, for instance, your bathtub.\\nAt that water pressure, you could not survive for even one second. You would be instantly crushed into a messy blob if you were suddenly transported into water that deep, because your body is adapted to live on the earth\\u2019s surface. But the opposite is true for the blobfish. If it was suddenly transported to the earth\\u2019s surface, or at least the water\\u2019s surface, without all that comfortable pressure keeping its body in place like a really big exoskeleton you can swim through, the blobfish would expand. And that\\u2019s exactly what happens when a fishing net catches a blobfish and pulls it to the surface. It just goes BLOB all over the place.\\nThe blobfish was voted the world\\u2019s ugliest animal in 2013, which doesn\\u2019t seem fair since no one looks good when they\\u2019ve exploded into a blob.\\nWhen the blobfish is alive in its deep-sea home, it\\u2019s silvery or grayish with little spikes all over its body. It\\u2019s a member of the family Psychrolutidae, sometimes called toadfish, and it has little black eyes near the top of its head sort of like a toad. Its head is large and wide, while its body tapers to a thin little flat tail.\\nWe know almost nothing so far about the blobfish, but we do know a bit about some of its close relatives like the blob sculpin. The blob sculpin lives in the North Pacific Ocean in even deeper water than the blobfish, up to 9200 feet deep, or 2800 meters. That\\u2019s about a mile and three-quarters deep, or almost 3 kilometers. Deep-sea animals are mostly solitary, but the blob sculpin gathers in large numbers to spawn. The females choose a nesting area and they all lay their eggs in the same place. Then the males release sperm into the water that fertilizes the eggs."