The Life of a Tripod Fish

• Rachel Snyder, Art, University of Delaware

• Blazo Kovacevik, Art & Design, University of Delaware

“The Life of a Tripod Fish” is a 3D-animated short film that follows the life cycle of a

deep-sea tripod fish, from its birth in the surface waters to its adulthood in the abyss. Throughout

its journey, the fish escapes several predators before eventually finding itself in the midst of a

deep-sea mining operation. The animation was created with the 3D computer graphics software

Blender, incorporating textures and backgrounds that were hand-drawn using charcoal on paper.

Some scenes feature stop-motion animations, created by drawing, photographing, erasing and

redrawing a sequence of frames on a single sheet of paper. I selected the tripod fish (Bathypterois

grallator) as the protagonist of this project, since I view this fish as one of the more alluring

representatives of the thousands of obscure deep-sea species whose survival could be

inadvertently impacted by humanity’s exploitation of the ocean’s mineral resources. “The Life of

a Tripod Fish” aims to remind the viewer that every deep-sea animal has a story. Every adult fish

beat the odds to get where it is now, and doesn’t deserve to have its legacy blindly erased by

certain companies’ interests in harvesting nickel and manganese from the seabed. While

producing “The Life of a Tripod Fish” I attempted to accurately depict the appearance and

behavior of the fish, but, as this project is foremost a work of artistic expression, I occasionally

strayed from scientific accuracy in favor of telling a coherent story. The drawing and software

skills I developed through producing this animation will be valuable for future endeavors that

involve using art to present marine science topics in a format accessible to non-specialists.