It’s not pretty – but it is huge!!!
A new bony fish world record: Sunfish (Mola alexandrini) found dead at the Azores with 2744kg / 325cm 🤯https://t.co/t1aKKnjvtb pic.twitter.com/tTqlJwbHoe— Alexander Kotrschal (@KotrschalA) October 12, 2022
There are many strange creatures in the sea. Big and small, cute and terrifying, weird and weirder. One of those creatures is the giant mola, also known as the ocean sunfish. In December of 2021, a dead one was found floating near Faial Island off Horta Harbor in the Azores archipelago, Portugal. Turns out it was the heaviest bony fish ever recorded. How heavy was it, you ask? A staggering 6,050 pounds.
Ocean sunfishes are the heaviest living bony fish in the world. They can generally grow up to 10 feet in length — although the one found in the Azores was longer — and apparently weigh more than 6,000 pounds. Most of the time, they’re floating around in the deep ocean, but they do come up to the surface on occasion, where they float on their sides to warm up and let the birds eat the parasites off them. The birds or Mark Healey, who ever gets there first.
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The record-holding sunfish was found by Rede de Arrojamentos de Cetáceos dos Açores (the Azores marine strandings network), hauled into a boat, then taken to land, where it was weighed with the help of a forklift. It was nearly 12 feet long. There are three different species of sunfish: the ocean sunfish (Mola mola), giant sunfish (Mola alexandrini), and the hoodwinker sunfish (Mola tecta).
“The Mola alexandrini reported here is the heaviest extant teleost specimen reported to date,” researchers wrote. “It exceeds by nearly half a ton (444 kg [979 pounds]) the largest previously known specimen (2300 kg [5,070 pounds]), caught off Kamogawa, Japan in 1996… Giant sunfishes (Mola alexandrini) can thus reach more than twice the maximum weight of its congeneric, the ocean sunfish Mola mola (heaviest record 1320 kg [2,910 pounds]).”
It’s not exactly clear how the enormous fish died, but researchers suspect it might have been hit by a boat. “A dent on its head with signs of paint indicates the animal was hit by the keel of a boat at some point,” wrote IFL Science, “but whether this happened pre- or post-mortem isn’t clear.”
