Aquanauts onboard  Nekton’s Maldives Knowledge Exchange Expedition were greeted by never-before seen creatures on Monday.
Aminath Shaha Hashim, Maldives Project Manager for Blue Marine Foundation and chairperson for Maldives Resilient Reefs, Mohamed Ahusan, Senior Research Officer at Maldives Marine Research Institute and submersible pilot Kimly Do descended on Monday’s dive to 500m below sea level.
During the scientific dive, the aquanauts conducted three transects of 250 metres, and recorded what they saw while four cameras recorded the video from different directions.
Photos and videos posted by Shaha on her Instagram story show the aquanauts encountered different species of fishes and octocorallia in the twilight zone. On the video, Shaha excitingly noted they were encountering some of the ‘twilight-zoners’ for the first time.
The highlight among the reel was the ‘hello’ by a fish that appeared to be ‘walking on the sea floor’ at 490m.
“The most exciting fish for me was this beauty saying hello to the first humans it has seen… it has legs!” Shaha captioned her video of the walking fish.
The MMRI also shared a video of the strange-looking fish.
The excitement for the aquanauts was further extended as they were greeted by a manta ray during their ascend to the surface.
Following the dive, Shaha consulted with Professor Alex Rogers of Nekton Mission, the fish taxonomy expert, about the walking fish. Professor Alex noted the fish belongs to the family of Coffinfish, a family of deep-sea anglerfishes known as the Chaunacidae.
The collaboration between Maldives, India, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom is to explore the depths below 30m in the Indian Ocean for the first time, and gather vital data which will better inform governments and the scientific community worldwide as they tackle climate change.
The expedition is part of a wider five-week mission under the joint auspices of the Government of the Maldives and the UK marine research institute Nekton. The 10-strong knowledge exchange team will join scientists on the mission in what marks the start of a new era of scientific collaboration between scientists from the Indian Ocean and their UK colleagues.
The expedition will undertake the first systematic discovery and documentation of ocean life in the Maldives from the surface to 1,000m. The expedition will deploy human-occupied submersibles, robots, autonomous systems, and over a dozen advanced subsea research technologies.