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Now the scientists — who were researching pelagic sharks at the country’s Canary Islands — are going to study the anglerfish’s body, hoping to learn more about its uncharacteristic behavior.

"Higher swells, sea surface temperatures are much warmer and they're having difficulty getting flying fish now at the beginning of our pelagic season."

They then employed Bayesian models to reconstruct ancestral habitats, revealing that ceratioids originated from benthic ancestors before transitioning to the pelagic zone.

The usual hue of the living version is greenish-brown, according to John Ugoretz, pelagic fisheries and ecosystem program manager for the department.

Their analyses show that the rapid transition of ancestrally bottom-dwelling, or benthic, anglerfishes into open-ocean, or pelagic, habitats occurred during a period of major global warming 50 to 35 million years ago.