bogleech:

I’m suddenly seeing this posted all over the place but it’s completely false, sorry guys.

The largest species ever discovered is only three feet in length, and it’s the least scary, most normal looking one there is:

Those giant mouths and super long needle-teeth just aren’t very efficient at larger sizes.

Most of the especially freaky ones are only about actual-football-sized or smaller. 

Large deepsea fish are extremely rare, due to the amount of food they need. Also, keep in mind that anything with a body shape like that, the large mouth and stretching stomach, is like that because it mostly eats large prey items. For an anglerfish to have a reason grow that large, it would need to primarily eat large prey items. Now, off the top of my head, the only deepsea animal that gets that large (aside from giant squid, which would probably put up too much of a fight) is the sleeper shark, an extremely slow-moving shark that almost entirely eats dead things. There aren’t many of those, so the angler in question wouldn’t get much to eat, and would pretty quickly wipe out all the sleeper sharks in the area. Plus there’s the fact that a mouth like that gets slower and slower as the animal gets bigger, and the angler’s tactics rely on a fast bite. 

Now, if you want to invent an anglerfish-like animal that grows to that size because it lives in shallow water (think frogfish), lurks on the bottom, and eats things like seals? That could work.