Scaly Dragonfish
The scaly dragonfish or boa dragonfish (Stomias boa boa), is a medium-sized abyssal barbeled dragonfish of the family Stomiidae. It is found at great depths worldwide in tropical to temperate oceans but is absent from the northern Pacific and northwest Atlantic Oceans.
Stomias boa boa is an elongated, slender fish. The head is small, the mouth has a protuberant lower jaw and sharp, pointed teeth.
There is a large fleshy barbel projecting from the chin with a pale stalk, a dark spot at the base of the bulb and a dark filament. The dorsal fin has no spines and 17 to 22 soft rays and the anal fin has 18 to 22 soft rays. The dorsal and anal fins are positioned on the slender caudal peduncle and the caudal fin is forked. The skin is covered in small hexagonal scales.
The maximum length of this fish is about 32 centimetres (13 in). Like many fish of deep oceans, it has large eyes and is transparent and silvery in appearance with iridescent speckles.
Stomias boa boa has a wide distribution, being found in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, the western Mediterranean Sea, the west coast of Africa as far south as Mauritania and southern Africa from Angola to the Cape of Good Hope.
On the other side of the Atlantic it is found from the Northwest Territories of Canada to Argentina. It is also known from Chile and the sub-Antarctic region of the Indian Ocean south to Heard Island. It usually inhabits waters deeper than 1,000 metres (3,300 ft) in the daytime but migrates upwards towards the surface during the night.