The International Maritime Museum Hamburg is offering fascinating insights into the barely explored deep sea with a show all about lantern fish, pelican eels, bristlemouths and other mysterious creatures that live there.
On display in one of the host cities of the Euro 2024 men's football championship, the "Deep Sea Habitat" exhibition features about 20 of these extremely rare specimens from the oceans' depths, the museum announced.
The animals, recently preserved and suspended in alcohol to showcase their vivid colours can be illuminated by museum visitors with a press of a button on the glass containers.
The exhibits, which come from the collection of marine biologist Johannes Kinzer, originate from international expeditions across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans spanning from the 1960s to 1990s.
"The deep sea is the least explored area on earth," said curator Sonja Schäfer, "and for this reason it is an interesting and mysterious habitat."
The bizarre creatures, rarely seen outside research institutions, had to develop special strategies to camouflage themselves and find prey.
"Because these animals are usually part of research in institutes, they are almost never made available for exhibitions," says ocean researcher Gerd Hoffmann-Wieck.
The animals are on display thanks to a long-term loan from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Germany's coastal city of Kiel - providing a rare educational opportunity for museum-goers.
