I’m too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I’m going to assume that the hadal zone gets its name for Hades, the underworld. Hell.
It is literally the crushing depths, about 6,000-11,000 meters, and certainly hellish, indeed. A couple of years ago, one group from the University of Aberdeen sent some probes down to see what’s shaking. (Called HADEEP, short for hadal deep, which is kind of an obvious name, really, but the whole thing is genius, read the blogs from their expeditions here and here, good fun.) One of their discoveries was this species of snailfish, pseudoliparis amblystomopsis, the second-deepest species of fish ever recorded.
Scientists from the expedition described them as “surprisingly cute.”
And they are cute. A cuddly species of fish that look like giant tadpoles. How adorable. Oh look! Here’s a group of them frolicking on the ocean floor.
Except they’re not frolicking, they’re likely stripping clean a corpse. Yes, giant tadpoles that strip dead, fallen flesh. Yay! And that’s what they call food that’s dropped from on high, “food-falls.” The snailfish religion probably involves a lot of looking up and praying for a whale to have a heart attack.
It seems innocuous, after all they’re just part of the circle of life, the janitorial part. Of course, I think there is reason to believe that they’d take matters into their own hands, which is why I’m not going down there. Well, that and the crushing hell part.