Scientists Stumped After 'Otherworldly' Creature Gets Caught By Local Fisherman

"No, I haven't seen nothing like that. To tell you the truth, I don't want to see much more!" Garry said of the creature he reeled in that day. Garry didn't cast out his net in hopes of finding something extraordinary, however. In fact, it all started as a perfectly normal day.

Garry found his monster from the deep when he was fishing in Bonavista Bay for turbot, a flatfish that can reach up to 30 pounds. His crew dropped his nets to 460 fathoms (2624 feet), watched the nets disappear beneath the surface, and waited for them to fill.

That afternoon, his crew raised the nets from deep in the bay and found something...unexpected. "We're hauling away, and by and by, I seen this coming around the roller. I said, 'Good God! What in the heck was that?'" Garry said. "I've never seen nothing like that before!"

Along with the rest of their catch, there was a strange fish that was almost three feet long. Garry picked up the sea creature and examined it. At first, he "thought it was a platypus, because he had that big snout on it," he said.

"It looked like he had wings, and his nose was, it was almost like rubber,” Garry said. “I guess it was like cartilage." No one else on the boat was sure what they’d accidentally caught in their net. Garry’s curiosity wasn’t satiated.

Fishermen are curious by nature — after all, you never know what you'll find in the bottom of your net every day — and since the ocean is literally crawling with bizarre deep sea critters, Garry was determined to identify what he'd caught. He knew he needed an expert's opinion.

He needed to know what this thing was. "I brought it into the fish plant, to the wharf where we offloaded, and nobody in there knew — haven't seen it before," Garry said. Next, he posted a picture on his Facebook profile, asking the internet for help.

Of course, everyone loves a good fish mystery, right? With the entire internet at his fingertips, not to mention interested people who heard his story, it was only a matter of time before the fish was identified. The strange nose, the "wings," the rubbery skin — it all made much more sense than Garry thought.

"I found out that it was a long-nosed chimaera," he said. But learning the name of the weird-looking fish didn't exactly clear anything up. He'd never heard of a chimaera before, and definitely never expected one to wind up in his net. Thankfully, marine biologist Carolyn Miri was there to help.

“They're really fascinating,” Miri said, and she wasn't wrong: These deep-sea dwellers are related to sharks and stingray-like fish called skates. In a way, chimaeras are the perfect combination of the scariest qualities of each fish, and their appearance isn’t the only unique thing about them.

"[They] actually are cartilaginous fish. So, all of it is made of cartilage — like the bridge of your nose," Carolyn said. "It doesn't have a skeleton made of bone, like we do." If this kind of creature sounds alien-like, that's because it kind of is. How this guy made his way to Newfoundland is a mystery...

Chimaeras live 650 to more than 3,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. They’ve been discovered at depths of nearly 10,000 feet, too. "Because of their deep-water habitats … we actually don't know very much about their biology, their life history and their behavior," Carolyn said. What we do know about chimaeras comes from a most unlikely source.

"Chimeras" are actually mythical figures. A fire-breathing monster comprised of several species of animals, most illustrations of a mythical chimera show a creature the looks like a lion with a goat head sticking out of its back and with a snake for a tail. So how did the not-mythical chimaera get its name?

Well, take a look at this chimaera. Pretty creepy, right? A chimera from mythology is a combination of different animals, and so, too, is a real-life chimaera. The long-nose chimaera fish is aptly named because it “does appear to be some sort of a cross between a bird and a dinosaur,” Carolyn said.

"It has a long, pointy snout. Its green eyes are bright neon," she added. The eyes, according to Miri, are what gives this creature the monstrous "chimera" effect, hence the name. Though chimaeras are pretty mysterious creatures for scientists, they do know a little about how its monstrous make-up works.

Like other cartilaginous creatures, chimaeras use tooth plates to crush crabs, shrimp, and other hard-shelled creatures living their lives on the ocean floor. Remember how chimaeras are related to sharks and sting-ray skates? Well, they also inherited some of their scariest qualities.

In adulthood, long-nosed chimaeras can grow four-and-a-half-feet and are known for having strong, venomous spines. "We didn't know it had a spine with venom in it. It was just another fish to us ... and we were handling that with bare hands!" Garry exclaimed.

Luckily for Garry and the rest of his crew, the fish died when they were reeling the net out of the water. "With the water pressure change, when a harvester is retrieving his or her gear, that often causes lots of deep-water animals to die on the way up to the surface of the ocean," Carolyn said.

If the fish was still alive on the boat, the fishermen could have been hurt. "It does have a long, sharp spine … and that could inflict a bad injury if the animal was alive and flailing, thrashing about," Carolyn said. You shouldn't let your guard down the next time you encounter a dead chimaera, however.

"Even with a dead animal, people need to be super-careful, because of that long spine,” Carolyn said. “It's very sharp." You know an animal is dangerous when it can still hurt you after it’s dead. But believe it or not, the otherworldly chimera is far from the strangest thing people have fished out of the ocean. In fact, there was something even more unexpected that a group of fisherman snatched from the ocean off the coast of Alabama, and it attracted all kinds of attention from the public.

When the crew of Still Flyin Charters in Orange Beach, Alabama, set out on a routine excursion out of Perdido Pass, they were expecting it to be a normal day...or as normal as it gets while fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. They’d seen some once-in-a-lifetime sights there before.

When you’re fishing in the Gulf, you come across all kinds of marine life you probably wouldn’t see on an average beach day: dolphins, snapper fish, even some whales and manatees. It’s not just a place of weird sights, but of weird sounds, too.

Fishermen like those with Still Flyin Charters are used to the sound of the waves hitting the side of the boat, the wind whistling through their ears, and a fishing line getting pulled by something hungry beneath the waves. But on that day in July 2020, something was different.

Since they ran a charter boat, the sounds of people oohing and aahing over their catches is all part of a normal day. A fisherman gets used to the ordinary sounds of a fishing excursion, so when a foreign sound reached their ears, they immediately knew something was wrong.

Steve Crews, the captain and owner of Still Flyin Charters, quickly looked over the side of the boat at the waves below. The guests on the boat heard the sound, too: a soft wailing noise, like someone or something struggling in the water.

The wailing noise was coming from a tiny, furry creature struggling against the waves. Without skipping a beat, Crews and his fellow fishermen grabbed their nets and started to do what they do best: fish. But what they pulled out of the water didn’t have gills.

It had a skinny body, two floppy ears, and its eyes screwed up tightly against the current. “He was struggling to stay up,” Still Flyin Charters explained of the creature on their Facebook page. It wasn’t until they finally pulled the little guy out of the waves that they recognized it.

It was a tiny orange kitten. “Our catch of the day,” Still Flyin Charters wrote on Facebook. Looking at the poor kitten, it was clear that he had been through quite the ordeal. Just because he was finally safe on the boat didn’t mean he was going to survive...

And looking at this photo, the poor guy definitely looked worse for wear when he was rescued! Thankfully, the crew knew exactly what to do. “We caught him, brought him in the boat, and let him recover.” Still, everyone had plenty of questions.

When Still Flyin Charters posted the story onto their Facebook page, they were bombarded with questions: How did this happen? Did the cat fall in from another boat? Was the cat being used as shark bait? Or was it something even more sinister?

“No one uses kittens for shark bait,” Still Flyin Charters was quick to point out. “I used to commercial shark fish for a living. Never heard of anyone doing that.” Many people were alarmed by the possibility that the cat didn’t end up in the water by accident.

”I want to assume it was an accident, but there are a lot of mean people when it comes to animals, so you just don’t know,” one person commented on Facebook. As the fishing experts, Still Flyin Charters have their own theory about how it happened.

They think he was simply “sucked out by the tide.” Curiosity has been known to kill the cat in the past, after all! At least the little guy was scooped up before any real damage was done...that the crew knows of, that is. Now, the kitten is still fighting to recover.

According to Still Flyin Charters, the cat is still a little jumpy from the whole experience. “He’s hanging around the house because he’s terrified inside,” the Charter company wrote on Facebook. They had doubts that he would ever be able to coexist with people…

That is, until he was adopted! As it turns out, the feral cat just needed some time and love in order to recover and find a forever home. Still, this story wasn’t over yet. A few days later, Still Flyin Charters got a letter in the mail.

The letter was from PETA, and they had some choice words for Still Flyin Charters. They thanked the crew for saving the cat and for being “kind citizens” before reminding the fishermen that “fish are living beings capable of feeling pain...just as cats are.”

Still Flyin Charters didn’t let the criticism about their occupation get them down. What wasn’t controversial about the whole story was how they were able to save a cat from drowning, after all. Of course, the seriousness of the story didn’t stop people from making jokes.

“That’s the strangest looking catfish I have ever seen,” someone commented on Facebook about the waterlogged cat. The cat probably is one of Still Flyin Charters' weirdest catches! As they admitted on Facebook, “can’t say you see that every day."

People have even offered up their own name ideas for the little seafarer: “Nemo,” “Shark Bait”, “Jonah”, and “Gilligan” have been popular choices. Ultimately, it was the Still Flyin Charters' crew who picked the little kitten's name, and it is perhaps the most clever option of them all.

“Lucky” — the most fitting name of all! It was definitely a rare stroke of luck that Still Flyin Charters happened to find the little kitten when they did and that they found him a real forever home. Too often, people use shelters as a dumping ground for their neglected pets.