A juvenile snailfish has been filmed swimming at a depth of 8,336m off the south of Japan in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench.

This new record for the deepest fish ever filmed was set on Aug 15, 2022, by scientists from The University of Western Australia (UWA) and Japan, according to a statement by UWA.

The fish is from an unknown snailfish species of the genus Pseudoliparis. A specimen was not caught to fully identify its species type, according to BBC News.

“We have spent over 15 years researching deep-sea snailfish; there is so much more to them than simply the depth, but the maximum depth they can survive is truly astonishing,” Professor Alan Jamieson said.

Prof Jamieson, founder of the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre and chief scientist of the expedition, worked with a team from the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology to deploy baited cameras in the deepest parts of the trenches.

“In other trenches such as the Mariana Trench, we were finding them at increasingly deeper depths just creeping over that 8,000m mark in fewer and fewer numbers, but around Japan, they are really quite abundant,” he added.

Their research ship, DSSV Pressure Drop, embarked on a two-month expedition in August and September 2022 to the deep trenches around Japan in the northern Pacific Ocean.

The deepest fish was recorded by a camera system attached to a frame released from the ship. Bait was placed on the frame to attract marine life.

This discovery beat the previous deepest fish observation record in 2017 by 158m, at a depth of 8,178m in the Mariana Trench, located further south in the Pacific, according to media reports.

Despite the large and somewhat lively population of fish living at these depths, the solitary individual that claims the accolade of the deepest ever found was an extremely small juvenile, UWA said.

Snailfish tend to be the opposite of other deep-sea fish, where the juveniles live at the deeper end of the depth range.