‘Faceless’ deep-sea creature spotted by submersible off Cook Islands. Watch it
From corn mazes to haunted houses, the spooky season is in full swing. Jack-o-lanterns, ghouls and goblins are around every corner, but the scariest creatures of all might be thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface.
In the deep sea off the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, a remote exploration vehicle is spending the month of October exploring the seafloor for EVNautilus, from the Ocean Exploration Trust.
As the research vessel reached thousands of feet deep, scientists looking through the cameras spotted something ahead of them in the water, according to an Oct. 10 video posted on YouTube.
From a distance, it looked almost like a tadpole with a large, bulbous front and long, fish-like tail, the video shows.
It was actually a “faceless” creature — and it wasn’t the only one.
“Spooky season must be here because while exploring the seafloor in the Cook Islands, our team came across these two eerie but amazing faceless cusk eels (Typhlonus nasus),” researchers said in the YouTube caption. “Navigating the world guided by their large nostrils, Typhlonus eels live as deep as (16,732 feet).”
The juveniles of these “creepy critters” can sometimes have eyes found deep beneath the skin, but adults are completely eyeless, according to the caption.
“The bulbous head of the species of Typhlonus is probably filled with a light ion fluid, like maybe lithium chloride, and that provides positive buoyancy,” a researcher can be heard saying in the video. “That’s a cheaper alternative energetically than maintaining a gas filled swim bladder given the great pressure at depth.”
The species was first discovered in the 1870s off the northern Coral Sea of Australia, but then it was missing from the scientific record for more than a century.
It was rediscovered in 2017 during a research voyage, according to The Guardian.
“This little fish looks amazing because the mouth is actually situated at the bottom of the animal so, when you look side-on, you can’t see any eyes, you can’t see any nose or gills or mouth,” researcher Tim O’Hara told the outlet at the time. “It looks like two rear-ends on a fish, really.”
The Ocean Exploration Trust maintains a livestream of the expedition, including the depths and headings of the ROV Little Hercules and ROV (Towsled) Atalanta.
The 21-day voyage in the Cook Islands intends to “explore previously unsurveyed deep-sea priority areas identified by the management and science community in the Cook Islands,” according to the Ocean Exploration Trust.
The Cook Islands are in the South Pacific, about 3,100 miles off the east coast of Sydney, Australia.
This story was originally published October 13, 2025 at 4:54 PM with the headline "‘Faceless’ deep-sea creature spotted by submersible off Cook Islands. Watch it."
