Mola Mola

[Drunk Monk]

Maybe some of you know this already but I've been obsessed with ocean sunfish since childhood. It's such a dumb fish design, like a child's drawing. I love them. I love weird sea creatures. Mola mola are super weird. 

Record-breaking bony fish weighing 3 tons found in Portugal
Updated: 2:36 AM PDT Oct 19, 2022

Infinite Scroll Enabled

Hafsa Khalil, CNN


[b]Azores archipelago, PORTUGAL —[/b]
A giant sunfish believed to be the world's heaviest bony fish has been discovered in the Azores archipelago, Portugal, weighing a whopping 3 tons (6,000 pounds).
Researchers said the animal was found dead, floating near Faial Island in the central North Atlantic in December.
Although found last year, details of the discovery have only recently been published in the Journal of Fish Biology.
Studied by researchers from the Atlantic Naturalist Association and the Azores University for biometrical and morphological data, both in Portugal, the fish was pulled to shore where the animal was weighed, measured and tissue sampled for DNA testing.
There are around 29,000 species of bony fish, which have a skeletal bone structure, making them the majority of the world's fish species.
The carcass is more than 882 pounds heavier than the previous world record holder for heaviest bony fish — a 5,070-pound female giant sunfish caught off Kamogawa in Japan in 1996.
The sunfish was weighed with a crane scale dynamometer — a device designed to weigh loads typically hoisted by a crane — after being raised above ground using a forklift truck.

Atlantic Naturalist.ORG
The giant sunfish was carefully lifted by a forklift so that it could be weighed and measured.
The animal was 10.67 feet long and had a height of 11.78 feet. Measured around its center (mid-body), it had a maximum width of 2.82 feet, researchers said. The sex has not been determined.
José Nuno Gomes-Pereira, lead author of the paper and postdoctoral researcher from the Atlantic Naturalist Association, told CNN Tuesday that it was saddening "to see the animal in this situation as it must have been a king of open ocean."
The "tremendously big" sunfish has been buried in the Natural Park of Faial Island, he added.

Atlantic Naturalist.ORG
The heaviest bony fish in the world is a giant sunfish of 2,744 kilograms discovered in the Azores archipelago.
Gomes-Pereira said that the finding was a "sign that the oceans are still healthy enough to sustain the heaviest species existing, but a warning for more conservation in terms of pollution and boat traffic near oceanic islands."
Giant sunfish (Mola alexandrini) were first recognized as their own species in 2018 and are known to weigh twice as much as the second heaviest fish species, the ocean sunfish (Mola mola), according to a news release from the Atlantic Naturalist Association last Thursday.
Gomes-Pereira said the dead sunfish had a "contusion" — a bruise — on its front, which may have caused the animal's death. However, it is unknown if the impact was pre- or post-mortem. The wound was embedded with a red paint normally used to coat the keels of boats, the journal article added.
With little data available on large specimens such as the sunfish, the researchers believe further study is required to understand their physiology and marine ecosystems in general.
The world's heaviest fish species is the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), according to Guinness World Records, with the heaviest found in Pakistan in 1949, weighing 21.5 metric tons.

[Greg]

I keep looking at it and trying to make some sense of what I'm seeing and it doesn't happen.

[Drunk Monk]

Does this help?

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

They are super weird. Does anything eat them? They are so slow, but I guess sharks are like "nah, gonna git me a surfer instead"? I've seen them off os S'Cruz

[Drunk Monk]

You’ve seen them in the wild? So jealous.

I’ve only seen them in aquariums. I think Monterey has one.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

I had a one week gig on a tiny commercial fishing boat a thousand summers ago. A friend of the family sort of thing. Being on the ocean in fog is very unsettling

[Drunk Monk]

A thousand summers ago

That was out of Innsmouth harbor where the Miskotonic river meets the sea, right? The ancient sea…back when you had tentacles instead of a beard…

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

"Instead"?

[Drunk Monk]

sad

Another giant sunfish washes up on Oregon Coast north of Seaside
A 5-foot ocean sunfish, also known as a Mola mola, washed up on the Oregon Coast near where a more rare sunfish was found just two months prior. 

Credit: Seaside Aquarium
A 5-foot ocean sunfish, also known as a Mola mola, washes up about a half mile south of Sunset Beach, just of north of Seaside in Oregon.
Author: Alex Jensen
Published: 11:48 AM PDT August 19, 2024
Updated: 2:05 PM PDT August 19, 2024

PORTLAND, Ore. — A "relatively small" 5-foot sunfish washed ashore about a half mile south of Sunset Beach, just of north of Seaside in Oregon.
According to Seaside Aquarium, the ocean sunfish, also known as a Mola mola, can get up to 10 feet and weigh as much as 5,000 pounds. The sunfish that washed ashore over the weekend, while still big for human standards, is considered among sunfishes as relatively small. 
In June, a more rare 7.3-foot sunfish washed ashore near Gearhart. The hoodwinker sunfish, or Mola tecta, was thought to only live in the Southern Hemisphere's temperate waters. But a few have recently washed ashore in California and Alaska. 
Mola mola is the more well-known sunfish; there's also the Mola alexandrini. All can be found around the globe, except for the polar regions. 
The key differences between the Mola mola and the more newly-discovered Mola tecta, first spotted in 2017, is the shape and size. Mola tectas are believed to only reach 7.9 feet and weigh around 4,000 pounds, Seaside Aquarium said. 

Credit: Seaside Aquarium
An ocean sunfish, also known as a Mola mola, washes ashore north of Seaside.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Love those guys. Big, stupid fish. Used to see them in the waters off S'Cruz the one week I worked on a small fishing boat.

[Drunk Monk]

There it is.

The fishing boat story again.

You sure you didn’t just dream that?

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

There it is.

The fishing boat story again.

You sure you didn’t just dream that?

Pretty sure. As I get older, though, I am less certain about many things, especially the past.

[Drunk Monk]

Actual footage of when the Yeti saw a Mola Mola off Santa Cruz.



It’s at the end. Wait for it…

[Drunk Monk]

This fish stopped eating. Was it loneliness, or something else?

Published 6 hours ago

Stephanie MacLellan
Copy Editor 

Expert says there could be more reasons for odd behaviour

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⭐️HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW⭐️

• A giant sunfish at a Japanese aquarium stopped eating recently. 
  
• It happened after the facility closed for renovations.
  
• Staff thought it was because the fish was lonely.
  
• One expert says it could be because of the sounds from the renovations. 
  
• Keep reading to find out what staff did to help. ⬇️⬇️⬇️
  

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Something was fishy with one of the most popular animals at the Kaikyokan aquarium in Japan last month.
The giant ocean sunfish had stopped eating and it was looking a little ill. 
Its keepers thought the issue was that the aquarium no longer had visitors, so they hung up pictures of people around the tank. 
The fish recovered, and the story of the lonely sunfish and its new paper friends spread around the world. 
It’s a fun story, but was it really that simple? 
One expert we spoke to said the inner lives of fish are a lot more complicated than we think. 
But when it comes to this particular fish, he thinks there were probably other explanations for its loss of appetite.

CAPTION/CREDIT: In order to help the sunfish at the Shimonoseki Marine Science Museum in Japan, staff put cardboard cutouts of people in uniforms outside the tank. (Kaikyokan/The Associated Press)

What happened to the sunfish? 
Ocean sunfish are huge. 
They can weigh up to 2,268 kilograms (about as much as a small car) and grow three metres long and more than three metres tall, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
They also look a little strange — relatively flat, with rubbery skin and a stumpy tail.
“They have this sort of Humpty Dumpty face and huge eyes,” said Chris Harvey-Clark, a marine biologist and director of animal care at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. 

The sunfish at the Kaikyokan aquarium in Shimonoseki, Japan, has lived there since February 2024. 
After the aquarium closed on Dec. 1 for a six-month renovation, it stopped eating, began banging into the side of the fish tank and appeared unwell. 
Staff thought it might have been affected by the sudden absence of visitors.
So they hung their uniforms, cardboard cutouts of people and photos of smiling faces outside the tank to make it look like the fish had visitors.
It started eating again the next day and its health soon improved.
Staff now visit the tank more often and wave at the sunfish.

The sunfish at the Shimonoseki Marine Science Museum swims near cardboard cutouts of people in uniforms on Jan. 21. (Kaikyokan/The Associated Press)

Fish are complicated, says expert
Harvey-Clark says there could be a lot of reasons why the sunfish lost its appetite, especially if noisy renovations at the aquarium had already started.  
“Fish are super sensitive to low-frequency vibration,” he said.
“We’re building a big aquarium at Dalhousie right now, and I can tell you when we start cutting concrete in a giant concrete building … the fish that are in our holding areas hundreds of [metres] away change their behaviour.”
Fish evolved to be highly sensitive to sounds and vibrations because they live underwater where there is low visibility, so they can’t always rely on their eyesight, he said.

It is possible the sunfish in Japan was affected by the lack of visitors, Harvey-Clark said, but that’s because fish in aquariums often respond to changes in activity patterns — not necessarily because it was feeling the emotion of loneliness.
He’s also skeptical that the human faces and cutouts made much of a difference, saying it’s likely a “coincidence” the fish started eating again because it would have been getting hungry anyway. 
But whether or not the sunfish was lonely, Harvey-Clark says this story is a good reminder that fish aren’t as simple as people often believe. 
“I think the big picture is, the next time you think about a fish, think about the world it lives in,” he said. 
“And it may not look a lot like you, but it’s still got two eyes, a mouth and a face and a head, and there’s a lot more going on there than you think.”