What Do Blobfish Eat?

The blobfish is not the most attractive creature on earth.  Many consider this as the ugliest fish on earth because of their deflated pudgy looks.   This fish species looks so conspicuous because its body is designed to live 600 – 1,200 meters below sea level where the pressure is much higher than it is in shallow waters.

At this great depth, the blobfish (psychrometers marcidus) is at its happiest and it can function very well especially since it doesn’t have too many predators to be wary of in these dark depths.  Here, the fish can simply float about for endless hours.

What Do Blobfish Eat?

Blobfish are not a very large fish species.  They grow up to 30 cm long and it isn’t a very agile hunter since it doesn’t have too many bones or muscle matter – the exact features that enable it to survive under high water pressure levels found undersea.

Blobfish usually float near the ocean floor where they can easily search for food without wasting too much energy.  They cannot hunt and need to suck available food into their mouths.  This fish will feed on just about anything edible.  Here is a quick look at the most common foods that blobfish like to eat:

Carrion meat

This is one of the most common foods for blobfish since they cannot hunt for food.  The blobfish simply sit patiently at the bottom of the ocean waiting for other dead fish species to sink deep down into the ocean.  Any pieces of meat they find floating about the ocean floor will then be sucked into their mouths and eaten.

Blobfish can eat just about any type of carrion meat they find including decayed meat.  They eat the meat of all fish species.

Crabs

Blobfish will also eat small crabs they find on the ocean floor.  They can suck in and eat live crabs but they cannot hunt for crab.  They will simply sit and wait for a crab to crawl by before sucking it in and swallowing it.  Blobfish will also eat dead carrion crab meat.

Sea urchins

Sea urchins are spiny globular animals that live on the seabed.  950 species of sea urchins do live on the seabed and they can vary quite a lot in size.  Blobfish usually focus on smaller sea urchins.  While there is a huge variety of urchin species, blobfish only feed on those found at the great ocean depths. They live in.

Sea pens

Sea pens are also a common food source for blobfish because they cannot move very fast.  This animal looks like sea anemones with tentacles with a feathery look.  Some sea pens can be quite small but others can grow up to 2 meters tall.  This animal is common to the great depths of the water because they cannot survive in turbulent waters.  The quieter waters where blobfish live is more suitable for them.

Shellfish

Shellfish are also common food for blobfish.  There are quite a lot of different species of shellfish such as mollusks, crustaceans, echinoderms, and many others.  Shellfish are found in seas and oceans all over the world.  Blobfish eat all shellfish species they find living in their natural environment.

Diet Variations

No one has ever studied a live blobfish.  It is impossible to tell exactly what foods this animal will eat until more research has been done on them.  We do know that they cannot hunt for food and will starve if food isn’t available to them.  They could therefore have quite a few diet variations since they managed to survive this long at these great depths of the ocean where food is a bit scarce.

Interestingly enough, no one has ever seen this fish species eat in action.  They are very hard to observe in their natural habitat since they live so deep under the ocean.  No one has ever documented living blobfish because they cannot survive in shallow waters.  The only reason we know what this fish species eat is because of auto biopsies performed on deceased blobfish.

How to Feed Blobfish

Blobfish cannot survive in shallow waters.  You also cannot keep this fish species as a pet simply because they cannot survive in our normal environment or normal aquatic tanks.

These fish species cannot hunt for food because they don’t have any bones and they have very few muscles.  They can only eat foods that drift about or live on the bottom of the ocean.  They get their food by sucking the food into their mouths before swallowing their food.  Their prey, therefore, needs to be dead or very slow.

What Do Blobfish Eat In The Wild?

In the wild, blobfish only eat food that they find in their natural environment.  They will eat all sorts of meaty foods such as carrion meat or crabs and shellfish that live at the bottom of the ocean.  They can also eat sea pens and sea urchins that live in these deep quiet waters.

If there is no food available for the blobfish it will likely starve to death because it isn’t very fast or any good at hunting.

What Do Baby Blobfish Eat?

Blobfish was only discovered in 2003 and they are very hard to study because they are found at such great depths of the ocean.  The exact diet and features of this fish are still uncertain.

Based on other fish species, baby blobfish likely eat all the same foods as adult blobfish but in much smaller sizes.  They also linger and float about the ocean floor and absorb the foods they happen to find.

Can Humans Eat Blobfish?

Most believe that blobfish isn’t edible food to humans because they don’t have much muscle tissue.  Eating a blobfish will be very much like eating a blob of gelatin.

This fish species is also highly endangered.  It is illegal to sell blobfish as food in restaurants.   It is very hard to catch blobfish since they live at such great depths of the ocean.

In 2016, a Blobfish Café was created.  This café doesn’t serve blobfish but the idea was to allow visitors to meet blobfish species kept in specialized aquatic tanks.