CURIOUS CATCH: Norwegian zoologist Ditlef Rustad (left) hauls his net out of the frigid waters of the Southern Ocean. Part of an expedition to Bouvet Island in 1927, Rustad discovered a bizarre fish with a protruding jaw, creamy white gills, and transparent blood. He called it the “white-blooded crocodile fish.” PRIVATE COLLECTION, LIV S. SCHJERVEN
On December 1, 1927, zoologist Ditlef Rustad pulled ashore on Bouvet Island, 1,750 kilometers off the coast of Antarctica, as part of a Norwegian expedition to claim the remote, wind-whipped island as a whaling outpost. Later that month, casting nets into the frigid waters, Rustad hauled up a very strange-looking fish. It had no scales and was very pale, even translucent in parts. Behind its protruding, crocodile-like jaw, he saw gills that were milky instead of the usual crimson. And when Rustad cut open the fish, he saw that its blood was transparent, like ice water. “Blod farvelöst,” he wrote in his notebook—“colorless blood.”
In a 1954 Nature paper, biochemist Johan Ruud confirmed that Chaenocephalus aceratus lacked red blood cells and hemoglobin, the protein that ...
