"Similar to how antifreeze in your car keeps the water in your radiator from freezing in cold temperatures, some animals have evolved amazing machinery that prevent them from freezing, such as antifreeze proteins, which prevent ice crystals from forming," said David Gruber, a research associate at the museum and a distinguished biology professor at CUNY's Baruch College. "We already knew that this tiny snailfish, which lives in extremely cold waters, produced antifreeze proteins, but we didn't realize just how chock-full of those proteins it is—and the amount of effort it was putting into making these proteins."

The icy waters of polar oceans are an extreme environment for marine life, limiting inhabitants to those with mechanisms to cope with freezing temperatures. Unlike some species of reptiles and insects, fishes cannot survive even partial freezing of their body fluids, so they depend on antifreeze proteins, made primarily in the liver, to prevent the formation of large ice grains inside their cells and body fluids. The ability of fishes to make these specialized proteins was discovered nearly 50 years ago, and scientists have since determined that antifreeze proteins are made from five different gene families.