Watching a fish drift backward through pitch-black Arctic water, curl its tail, hover for sixteen seconds, and then just disappear is subtly disorienting. It doesn’t appear to be survival. It doesn’t appear to be hunting. To be honest, it appears to be a creature that has nowhere to go.
That is essentially what researcher Evgeny Podolskiy also believed. He described the behavior of the snailfish with a kind of bewildered affection after watching video taken 853 feet below the surface of Inglefield Bredning, a glacial fjord carved into Greenland’s northwest corner. He said to Discover Magazine, “I don’t want to offend any fish, but it seems like there isn’t much to do down there.”
The video was taken from a study by researchers at Hokkaido University’s Arctic Research Center that was published in PLOS One in early May 2026. The setup was surprisingly straightforward: a lightweight camera system with an underwater microphone and red LED lights was anchored to the seafloor and left unattended for almost a week. Compared to the costly, ship-dependent equipment that has historically made conducting Arctic deep-sea research so challenging, the entire rig weighed less than fifteen kilograms and fit into a single transport box.
It turned out to be a well-thought-out and astute decision to point the camera upward. Narwhals, one of the animals the team most hoped to see, usually approach equipment from above, and sediment tends to cloud a lens facing downward. That upward angle became a sort of window into the layer of life hovering just above the seafloor, known to scientists as the hyperbenthos, over the course of 37 hours of recorded footage. A true cross-section of life in the deep Arctic, complete with shrimp, jellyfish, bristle worms, comb jellies, copepods, arrowworms, and amphipods racing about as if they were running late for something, drifted into the frame. Across 223 video files, at least 478 distinct organisms were counted; some are still completely unknown.
Even the scientists were taken aback by what the copepods—tiny crustaceans that normally float passively through water—did. They launched themselves away at startling speed, folding their antennae tightly against their bodies as they collided with the mooring line. Podolskiy said he was truly taken by surprise. That kind of alarm was not what he had anticipated from small, seemingly passive creatures. Watching this video gives me the impression that even the most basic organisms down there are using behavioral logic that we still don’t fully comprehend.
The thrill of the narwhals was different. Almost every day of the deployment, the hydrophones received their ultrasonic calls. A narwhal tusk once came within a few centimeters of the camera’s lens. Podolskiy acknowledged that his heart rate increased every time the calls got louder because he was constantly anticipating one to appear out of nowhere in the frame, possibly nudging or chewing on the equipment. The narwhals, on the other hand, appeared to be mostly indifferent, circling close but never quite interacting. Contrary to popular belief, that indifference was beneficial. Larger monitoring systems frequently draw narwhals due to their novelty; researchers could observe natural behavior without contaminating it by using a small, inconspicuous rig that the animals use as furniture.
Although Arctic glacial fjords have long been considered hotspots for biodiversity, their seafloors are still among the world’s least studied habitats. Extreme remoteness and technical challenges have forced scientists to use indirect techniques like sonar, which are helpful for mapping but can’t show you a snailfish drifting backward through the dark like it has nowhere to be. It has just been too costly and logistically difficult to conduct direct visual observation on a regular basis. That may be changing, according to this study. Monitoring these ecosystems more frequently and in greater detail, including tracking how they change as the Arctic ice continues its dramatic retreat, is made possible by a portable system that one team can set up from a small vessel.
It’s difficult not to think that this video comes at the perfect time. Ecosystems in glacial fjords are most likely responding in ways we won’t fully comprehend until we have years of comparative footage to look at. The Arctic is warming at a rate that exceeds almost every model scientists initially projected. A fish that swims backwards is endearing. Ten years from now, the same fish would tell a completely different story if it weren’t in the same frame.
But for the time being, the snailfish is just down there somewhere, tail curled, floating with the current, completely unaffected by the camera that made it momentarily famous.
