It was once crowned the “world’s ugliest animal” and now the disgruntled-looking gelatinous blobfish has a new gong to its name: New Zealand’s fish of the year.
The winning species of blobfish, Psychrolutes marcidus, lives in the highly pressurised depths off the coasts of New Zealand and Australia and has developed a unique anatomy to exist. Blobfish do not have a swim bladder, a full skeleton, muscles or scales. Instead, their bodies are made up of blobby tissue with a lower density than water that allows them to float above the seafloor.
The species is believed to be able to live to 130 years old, is slow growing and slow moving, says Konrad Kurta, a spokesperson from the Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust that runs the annual competition.
“It sort of sits there and waits for prey to come very close and practically walk into its mouth before it eats them,” he says. It is also a “dedicated parent” with females laying up to 100,000 eggs in a single nest, which they protect until they hatch.
The fish found fame over a decade ago after a crew member on a New Zealand research vessel snapped a photograph of the rarely seen animal. Its distinctive appearance was quickly adopted into meme culture.
The pressure of the water forces their shape into that of a regular – albeit bulbous – fish but out of the depths they can resemble “a failed medical experiment”, Kurta said.
“Regrettably, when it is pulled up … that sudden decompression causes it to become all disfigured,” Kurta says.
Little is known about their conservation status due to a lack of research, but their populations and habitat are considered vulnerable to deep-sea trawling.
“Blobfish are fairly frequently pulled up from the bottom-trawling of orange roughy,” Kurta said.
The Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust launched the Fish of the Year competition in 2020, inspired by the highly popular Bird of the Year. This year saw the highest number of votes cast in its competition – 5,583 in 2025, compared with 1,021 last year.
The blobfish won on 1,286 votes, pipping the orange roughy by 300 votes, despite the latter having powerful backers including Greenpeace, Forest & Bird and the Environmental Law Initiative.
“We are very pleased for the blobfish,” said Aaron Packard, a spokesperson for Environmental Law Initiative. “From an ecosystem perspective, a win for blobfish is a win for orange roughy.”
New Zealand is responsible for about 80% of the global orange roughy catch. Environmental watchdogs regularly call for a halt on fishing the species due to the destructive effects of bottom trawling on ecosystems and vulnerabilities in fish populations.
Other contenders in the competition included the mysterious longfin eel – known as tuna in Māori language – a pygmy pipehorse, a critically endangered mud-fish, sharks and rays.
“We have a dizzying variety of native marine and freshwater fish,” Kurta says, adding roughly 85% are considered vulnerable.
“That [these fish] exist is often the first step to getting people invested and interested in what’s happening below the waterline.”
