The Deep Blue Chromis is a vibrant, almost glowing, species of damselfish with intense blue spots which lives in deep waters off the coast of Indonesia and other western Pacific tropical waters. Its unusual habitat of deep coral reefs helped make it one of the top ten new species discoveries of 2008. It was first seen in 1997 by Richard Pyle of the Bishop Museum in Hawaii. It was observed several more times since then from a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) but was only recently named and described by Dr. Pyle in 2008.

Chromis abyssus has the distinction of being the very first species to be registered in ZooBank (the online registry of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature) and it was formally described in an article published exactly 250 years after the start of biological classification, or taxonomy, by Carl Linnaeus. It is also one of the exemplar species within the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org) which has a visionary goal of providing in-depth information about all of life on earth. Though not much is known about this species’ ecology, more can be found and updates can be made on the EOL.