Divers on shipwreck see spot of pink — and find rare fish that ‘walks’ on its fins

To commemorate the 140-year anniversary of the sinking of the SS Tasman, three divers jumped off a boat and into the waves, then made their way down to the ocean floor.

The wreck wasn’t what they would be talking about when they came back to the surface.

Divers James Parkinson, Brad Turner and Bob Van Der Velde were on the wreck in March, about 230 feet down, when Turner spotted something pink under the wooden beams of the ship, according to a March 16 Facebook post from Parkinson and a video posted on YouTube.

“Brad’s eagle eye spotted the little fish amongst the flattened wreckage of the Tasman,” Parkinson said.

They all swam over toward it and soon realized they were looking at something incredibly rare — a handfish.

“The pink handfish had only been observed by divers on three other occasions, this is the first video and photos taken by divers of the fish in its natural environment,” Parkinson said in the post.

Warning: This video appears to have explicit language.

“As can be seen from the video, I was pretty excited about the find,” Parkinson said.

That’s because handfish are an endangered species with only a handful of sightings, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

An underwater robot, operated by the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, captured images of the fish in 2021, according to the Handfish Conservation Project. Before that, one had not been spotted since 1999.

Only five of the fish have ever been found, the IUCN says, and they all were seen off the southern tip of Tasmania, an island south of Australia.

The fish are unique because they use their pectoral fins to literally “walk” along the seafloor, according to a Facebook post from Environment Tasmania. They don’t really swim at all, the organization says, relying on their strong steps to move them through the water.

When the divers went back down to the wreck in a second dive, they spotted two more, though it is not clear if one was the fish they saw previously, Parkinson said in the Facebook post.

“It gives us hope that the pink handfish have some deeper and cooler water refuge from the warming coastal waters that are threatening the existence of many Tasmanian marine species,” Neville Barrett, associate professor at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, told IFLScience.

The SS Tasman sank in fall of 1883 after striking a rock while trying to pass through a narrow passage by Tasmania on its way from Sydney, according to newspaper records at the time.

Now, the wreck is serving a new purpose.

“We were there to explore the wreck, but the handfish stole the show,” Turner told IFLScience.

Tasmania is an island state off the southeastern coast of Australia, about 150 miles from the mainland.

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