Dali House

Or is it actually more disturbing that this deep-sea vent annelid worm is so tiny that a scanning electron microscope is needed to photograph it? Just makes it that harder to keep track of, doesn’t it? Thank God there are websites like SerpentProject.com keeping an eye on these underwater horrors for us.

Larger menace takes the form of the myctophid lantern fish below, “possibly a juvenile”, the divers tell us. Does that mean he’s going to get uglier? Taken in the Indian Ocean at a seemingly safe 2,000 metres. Slid down nicely with a little meunière sauce.

No fish have been harmed in the making of this series on photographs from the deep, the tired joke might go, but the question of whether fish are capable of pain got a serious new reading recently in the Toronto Star, the premise being that animal-rights activists in Europe are moaning about fish farming.

It’s an interesting topic for Thailand, where fish farms are being set up as regularly as they used to build golf courses here.

Basically, people are again debating the difference between the very human terror attributed to by Nemo in the Pixar cartoon and the fresh scientific finding that trout have nociceptive nerves – A-delta fibres, which are associated with perceiving instant stimuli (like hitting your thumb with a hammer), and C fibres, which give you the lingering sense of injury (the subsequent throbbing).

While half of the nociceptive nerves in mammals are C fibres, in many fish they account for only 4 per cent. Sharks have none.

British scientists injected trout with bee venom, and the fish either temporarily lost their appetites, started beating water through their gills more frequently or rubbed their noses on the side of the tank.

Pain or mere reflex? And anyway, does the experience of pain require a higher consciousness, including self-awareness, memory and the ability to think and plan? If so, do fish have anything like that? We just don’t yet know, and there’s no convincing proof either way visible in the depths.