Two New Zealand snorkelers were mystified when coming across a bizarre, all-black, two-legged fish on a white seafloor in a bay near Auckland. So James Beuvink, 20, and his girlfriend, Claudia Howse, 19, scooped up the specimen and put it into the boat’s livewell where it started slowly walking around, according to Fairfax Media. “It had these little legs … I’d never seen anything like it,” Beuvink told Fairfax Media. “It was pretty chilled out. It’s not the biggest fish I’ve ever caught, but it was certainly the strangest.”
They eventually sent the fish to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand, where collection manager Andrew Stewart examined it and put photos of it on Facebook, where it started gaining world-wide attention. In an email to GrindTV, Stewart identified the specimen as a striped anglerfish, also popularly known as a striped frogfish. “The last time this species was sent to us was 2008, which gives you an idea of how ‘rare’ they are here,” Stewart wrote. “Elsewhere, the striped anglerfish is very common especially in the tropical and subtropical waters from the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. FULL REPORT
