today, I will introduce you to the largest bony fish currently living on this planet. they are active, deep-diving predators and excellent distance swimmers. adults can reach lengths of ten feet and weights of over 5,000 pounds. when they collide with boats, the boats often come off worse.
what are you picturing now? maybe a tuna? a swordfish?
those are all valid guesses, but you’re all WRONG AHAHAHAHAHA
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. LOOK AT IT. LOOK.
meet the Mola mola, or Ocean Sunfish. (we prefer Mola mola, honestly, it’s so much more fun to say. Mola mola. Mola molamolamola.)
Mola mola are the largest bony fish in the world (as opposed to the boneless fish, which can usually be found frozen in stick form in your nearest supermarket). adults are HUUUUUUGE and roughly disc-shaped. they can easily grow to 10′x12′, which are usually dimensions you only use if you’re talking about flooring.
yes lovely but does it come in a tile pattern?
the Mola mola is also notable for its ‘unique body plan’, which is Science for “jesus that’s a weird fucking fish”. most of its body consists of its giant fucking head, and it lacks a tail of any sort. instead, the Mola molamolamola gets around by flapping its dorsal and ventral fins (top and bottom. Science just likes to feel special.) like the wings of a butterfly.
A BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY
this might seem like a really dumb way to get around, but the Mola molamolamola (sorry, I’ll stop) makes it work. they can cross thousands of miles of open water at its slower cruising speed of 2 entire mph, but they are also capable of wiggling those fins fast enough to hurl themselves completely out of the water like a giant, horrifying Frisbee.
(in fact, Mola mola breaches can be a problem in some areas, as they aren’t very good at watching where they land and sometimes end up capsizing small boats. whoopsie!)
COWABUNGAAAAAAAA
the Mola mola eats mostly jellyfish and any other soft-bodied animal or plant it can fit into its ravenous horror beakmouth. they descend deep into the icy depths to hunt these soft boneless lunches, sometimes going deeper than 2,600 feet! can YOU do that?! no. you cannot.
after they have slaked their endless thirst for what are basically just organic plastic bags, the Mola molas return to the surface. there, they bask in the sunlight to raise their body temperatures. this is where the term ‘sunfish’ came from. (also at this point, they are sometimes struck by boats as fish are not capable of understanding nautical right of way.)
NO, YOU YIELD!
this basking habit is also unfortunate because it makes the Mola mola a giant, fish-shaped target floating around in open water. they are regularly eaten by sharks, sea lions, killer whales, and, uh…
humans.
oh yes, my regular predators include two marine apex predators and a bipedal ape. thanks, evolution.
Mola mola are regularly caught in huge numbers, and are now in decline worldwide. THIS IS NOT ALLOWED.
the recent creation of marine preserves does give some hope for the future of the Mola molamolamolamola, though there is still a lot of work needed to restrain overfishing.
hopefully these big big weirdos will continue to populate our oceans long into the future.
🎵JUST KEEP SWIMMING, JUST KEEP SWIMMING🎵
Please enjoy my favorite fish! And in case you were wondering what it’s skeleton looks like:
Mola mola munch munch! Target feeding with our two young ocean sunfish is a piece of cake. Both beasties have learned to hit their Mola marks to dine on tong-delivered delicacies!
Even though ocean sunfish have a brain the size of a walnut, they can be trained to recognize a visual dinner-bell (a “target” in the biz) to come over and be fed by hand.
The molas are fed a special blend of food inside a sausage casing, allowing us to study how fast these animals grow. Our daily tailgates with the molas prove that you can be bean-brained brainiac!
Well, not sharks, but how about some monday mola mola! Om nom nomming!
A new species of enormous ocean sunfish was discovered after an intensive search, making it the first species of this type of fish to be identified in 130 years.
Despite being the largest bony fish in the world and weighing more
than two tons, sunfish are quite elusive, which made the four-year
search difficult.
A team of researchers led by Marianne Nyegaard, a PhD student at
Murdoch University in Australia, analyzed more than 150 sunfish DNA
samples and recognized four distinct species—but only three of the
species had been previously identified.
The research team decided to call the
species the hoodwinker sunfish, Mola tecta, which comes from the
Latin word tectus, meaning hidden.It wasn’t until a year after this
breakthrough that Nyegaard was able to see a hoodwinker sunfish up
close. In 2014, she got a tip from a New Zealand fishery that four
sunfish had washed up on a beach in Christchurch, and she flew down to
see the evidence for herself.
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