A spear for a nose. A venomous spine on its back. A smooth, scale-less body and a face that looks disturbingly like a rabbit. The longnosed chimaera is one of the strangest fish in the deep sea. It seems assembled from leftover parts. It belongs to an ancient lineage. This group split from sharks nearly 400 million years ago. It has been doing its own weird thing ever since. The long, pointed snout is the standout feature. The chimaera uses it to probe muddy and sandy seafloor sediment. It hunts for buried worms and crustaceans. Once it finds something, tooth plates crush the hard shells. The venomous spine sits in front of the first dorsal fin. It is for defence. It is a sharp reminder. This odd-looking fish is not defenceless. All of this happens between 500 and 2,000 metres down. These are the darkest, coldest waters of the continental slope. Human eyes rarely venture here. Like many deep-sea fish, the longnosed chimaera lives a slow life. Decades of existence. Slow reproduction. That makes it vulnerable to disturbance. Nobody targets it directly. It turns up as bycatch in trawl and longline fisheries. These fisheries aim at orange roughy and oreo. Bottom trawling damages the muddy and sandy habitats where it feeds. The damage is permanent on human timescales. New Zealand's quota management system limits the bycatch that can be taken. We know very little about how many chimaeras exist. We do not know how many can be removed before populations start to slide. They are not alone in this predicament. Most deep-sea fish share the same problem. We are fishing in the dark. Literally and figuratively. We lack the basic data needed for sustainable management. For now, the longnosed chimaera is classified as not threatened. But that classification comes with a giant asterisk. It means we have no evidence of decline. It does not mean we have evidence of stability. A rabbit-faced ghost with a spear on its face. It probes the mud in the dark. It waits for us to learn a little more about its world. We might accidentally break it first. The deep sea is not empty. It is just unseen. The chimaera persists in the cold. It crushes shells in the silence. It avoids the nets when it can. It does not always succeed. The spine offers some protection. The darkness offers more. We are only beginning to map the slope. The chimaera was there before us. It will likely remain after we are gone. Unless we hurry.