Real palm-sized anglerfish shown in this photo?

In late September 2025, a Reddit thread (archived) claiming to show "a photo of an anglerfish's actual size" drew significant attention, amassing tens of thousands of upvotes and nearly a thousand replies in just a few days.

The post featured a graphic consisting of two photos displayed vertically. The top picture showed an anglerfish underwater and the bottom one displayed an anglerfish being held in the palm of a gloved hand.

The same graphic garnered tens of thousands of likes in an Instagram post (archived) a few months prior. A similar side-by-side image was posted on Facebook in February (archived), with that too being widely shared.

In short, the two photos in the graphic were real, in that they were not the product of artificial intelligence or digital manipulation. They showed the same species of anglerfish, if not the same individual anglerfish, and correctly depicted the deep sea creature's size.

The photos of the anglerfish came from an expedition by Condrik Tenerife, a Spanish NGO aiming to preserve sharks and rays. Condrik Tenerife first posted a video of the anglerfish on Feb. 5, 2025, and people on the expedition posted their own photos and videos in the days and months that followed. The expedition was off the coast of Tenerife, one of Spain's Canary Islands.

One of the people on the Condrik Tenerife expedition, Marc Martín, posted several photos of the anglerfish on Instagram. The second picture of his Instagram carousel (archived here) matched the one used as the top photo in the graphic in question. We reached out to him to discuss the images and await a reply.

The earliest version of the bottom photo appeared to come from a Feb. 11, 2025, X post (archived) by Dr. Carlos Cuadrado Gómez-Serranillos, who is not a marine biologist and did not appear to be on the expedition. However, a video posted to TikTok on Feb. 13, 2025, by the user jara.natura, who was on the expedition, included a shot of the same anglerfish in the same gloved hand from a different angle 18 seconds into the video. 

The photos showed a black seadevil anglerfish, according to a March 20 article in Oceanus, an ocean science magazine run by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Females typically grow to be about 6 inches long, while males, who exist only to reproduce, usually remain under an inch long, the Oceanus article said. 

A Monterey Bay Aquarium page for black seadevil anglerfish says the fish can be up to 8 inches long. However, some of the more than 200 species of deep-sea anglerfish can be up to 4 feet long, according to another page on the aquarium's website. The Smithsonian said that males of many species are much smaller than females, typically only growing to about an inch long. 

The tiny males typically lack the iconic bioluminescent lure associated with anglerfish, which was present on the anglerfish seen in the Tenerife expedition. That would mean the anglerfish seen in the person's palm was likely a female.