Everything seemed picture-perfect on a recent day at Grandview Beach in Encinitas, Calif. — the waves shimmered under the California sun, and locals sunbathed and swam.
Everything, except for one thing: the mysterious deep-sea creature that had washed up on the shore.
“What is that?” Alison Laferriere recalled thinking. She saw something long and skinny on the beach while walking her dog: “It looked like it could be some garbage or something.”
But when she got closer, Ms. Laferriere, a doctorate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, recognized the find immediately. She had a rare close-up view of the oarfish, a striking creature from the depths of the ocean that has eluded researchers over the decades.
With its long eel-like body, gaping mouth and bright red dorsal fins, it’s no surprise that the oarfish calls to mind a sea monster. Japanese mythology suggests that the appearance of the fish can signify impending earthquakes: Many have even wondered if reports of a dozen oarfish washing up on various parts of Japan’s coast were perhaps a harbinger of the catastrophic 2011 earthquake that devastated northern Japan. The superstition was so popular that researchers in Japan addressed it, publishing a paper in 2019 that debunked any significant link.
Still, the eerie mythology returns with every sighting of the oarfish — hence its nickname as the “doomsday fish.”
More superstitious Californians might be spooked, but researchers are thrilled at the rare opportunity. At least three have washed up on Californian shores in recent months, including a 12-foot-long specimen in August, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In all, only 22 have been documented by scientists since the 20th century.
“I did feel excited when I first saw it, and I knew it was important,” said Ms. Laferriere, who found the fish on Nov. 6. She waited by the oarfish until a researcher from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration retrieved it. “I wanted to make sure that someone could make use of the knowledge that it was there.”
At one point, she said with a laugh, she even chased down some surfers who looked like they were going to carry the fish away. She said, “I had to run down there and tell them, explain to them: This is a rare fish.”
“It’s a fish that anybody who works on fish knows about,” said Ben Frable, who manages the Marine Vertebrate Collection at the Scripps Institution. “Getting to see a fresh specimen and deal with that — and see this thing really truly to scale — was quite astounding.”
Believed to be the world’s largest bony fish, oarfish can grow as long as 26 feet, but even basic knowledge about their existence is murky: how long they live, for example, or how many of them are in the ocean.
“There is perilously close to nothing known about the life history and behaviors of these fish,” said Milton Love, a research biologist at the Marine Science Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
So what was a fish like that doing on a beach like this?
Most researchers believe the fish, which eat krill, live some 200 to 1,000 feet underwater where the current tends to be calm and there is very little sunlight. Others say they have been known to stick closer to the surface.
“They almost certainly do not swim very well,” Dr. Love said, adding he guessed that the oarfish died after getting caught up in tumultuous conditions that it was not equipped to navigate.
“They eventually can’t buck the swells and can’t buck the currents, and they wind up on the beach,” he said. “But that’s all just a guess.”
Other theories could be seasonal changes in ocean conditions or broader weather patterns like El Niño or La Niña, Mr. Frable said. The area was also experiencing Santa Ana winds, he said, which could have brought the oarfish closer to the shore.
Researchers have taken samples from the specimen, which will eventually join some two million specimens held at the Scripps Marine Vertebrate Collection, Mr. Frable said. Testing such samples could provide more answers about the oarfish’s genome, its role in the marine food web, and pollutants or contaminants it is absorbing from the environment, among other curiosities.
When deep-sea creatures emerge from the ocean, Mr. Frable said, they can remind people of the vastness of the planet’s biodiversity. After 20 years of studying fish, he said he still encountered fish that he had never heard of before. It only reiterates, he said, “how much variety there really is coexisting with us.”
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