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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Kit Roberts & John Bett

Walker finds strange 'Dracula' fish with huge teeth and reflective body

A walker was baffled after finding a strange fish they'd never seen before - and it had huge teeth and a reflective body.

The fish has two Dracula-like fangs that stick out the front of its mouth, alongside a large dorsal fin, an elongated body, and huge eyes.

It was spotted by someone out for a walk on a beach in California and posted to a local news feed called The West Marin Feed, as the Daily Star reports.

The creature measured about four feet in length and was reportedly still alive when the walker discovered it before trying to put it back into the surf.

Some thought the fish was a lancetfish (THE WEST MARIN FEED/FACEBOOK)

What do you think the creature is? Let us know in the comments...

Editor of The West Marin Feed Christian Anthony told Newsweek: "The fish was still alive when the beach walker found it. He put it back into the shorebreak to try and resuscitate it."

Christian later posted images of the fish online to see if anybody could help to identify it.

After only ten minutes, Christian heard from Christopher Martin, the curator of ichthyology at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, who identified the creature as a lancetfish.

Long-snouted lancetfish (Alepisaurus ferox) are large predatory fish that can grow up to seven feet in length.

They live in oceans all across the world except for the polar seas at depths of between 350 and 6,500 feet

Lancetfish hunt mainly in the Twilight Zone, an area of water where only a small amount of sunlight reaches even in clear tropical water.

In this very low light, reflective scales can help some creatures to blend in with the gloom around them as they appear the same shade as their surroundings.

Predators at this depth will also sometimes hunt by peering upwards and discerning their prey silhouetted against the glimmer of light from the surface.

Despite being very eerie, many smaller creatures will hide at this depth during the day and migrate to the surface every night to feed, before retreating back to the depths at dawn.

Lancetfish are active predators, and the unusual nature of their stomachs means that their meals often remain intact so scientists can see what they have been eating.

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Disturbingly this often includes other lancetfish, earning them the moniker of cannibal fish.

Given that they live in the Twilight Zone, lancetfish will have to take whatever meals come their way, even if it's a smaller lancetfish.

The fangs indicate that the fish hunt actively, impaling their prey on their fangs.

Another twilight zone hunter, the Fangtooth, actually has the largest known teeth in the ocean relative to its body size and cannot even close its mouth.

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