October 26th, 2010 
Deep sea fish take ugliness to new level, says Niwa
Shame…shame…shame to ever thought that calling deep-sea fish ugly was a compelling way spin the narrative about the great fish biodiversity of the depths. You know what? I don’t think they are ugly at all. In fact, deep-sea fish are bad ass. You know what else…deep-sea fish think your f’n ugly too!
via Deep sea fish take ugliness to new level, says Niwa – Science – NZ Herald News.
I’m with you. Did the NIWA person even say that they were ugly? And on a scale of fugliness, the hatchetfish pictured scores pretty low.
New Zealand Herald takes lazy journalism to new lows, says DSN
And to illustrate it, they’ve chosen this cutie fish, which looks instead ‘miffed’ and subject to a grave insult, maybe the one from Niwa?
Grow some scales, cap’n. You’re too thin-skinned.
Aww, the hatchetfish has puppy dog eyes. How could anyone call that thing ugly?
Wait a minute. The headline is a red herring. The real problem is that NIWA (the we-would-be-government-but-got-privatized) Water-Ocean-Atmosphere research group was deep sea trawling under contract from the fishing industry looking for ever deeper populations
of orange roughy … or ya know, anything they can bread, fry, and sell for $2/pc.
I’m sure that won’t be disruptive to the deep sea ecosystem at all…