A huge, alien-looking fish found washed up on the shores of the “American Riviera” — thousands of miles from its Southern Hemisphere home — has baffled experts.
Researchers resorted to testing tissue samples and poring over close-up photos to confirm the species, that had never been seen before in the Northern Hemisphere.
As a result, the mystery of the identity of the weird 7-foot sea creature, found dead on a California beach, has now been solved.
It’s a hoodwinker sunfish, a species which is so rare, that it was first found just two years ago on a New Zealand beach, thousands of miles away from America.
A thrilled University of California in Santa Barbara, whose staff found the sunfish, said, “there are rare finds, and then there are out-of-nowhere, first-ever discoveries that send scientists’ hearts aflutter.”
About a week ago, the gigantic fish washed in with the tides at UC Santa Barbara’s Coal Oil Point Reserve.
Now officially identified as a hoodwinker sunfish (“Mola tecta”), it “has never before been observed in the Northern Hemisphere,” the university adds.
The institution says that thanks to the quick work and collaboration of staff at the coastal reserve, and the university, the official determination of the sunfish was made by the world’s foremost expert on the species.
Marianne Nyegaard, of Murdoch University in Australia, discovered the hoodwinker ––the first addition to the Mola genus in 125 years.
Nyegaard named the hoodwinker for its elusive nature.
When she saw a post on Facebook about the discovery of the bizarre-looking fish on the California coast, she immediately became curious.
“I thought that the fish surely looked an awful lot like a hoodwinker, but frustratingly, none of the photos showed the clavus (a rounded rudder) clearly,” she said.
“And with a fish so far out of range, I was extremely reluctant to call it a hoodwinker without clear and unambiguous evidence of its identity.
“I just couldn’t be sure due to pixilation and kept thinking I was totally being hoodwinked by this stranded sunfish.”
She emailed ichthyologist Ralph Foster, of South Australia Museum, “and we discussed how this fish would have been a dead-set hoodwinker, had it been within range, in the temperate Southern Hemisphere.”
Nyegaard said that without photographic proof and evidence gleaned from the tissue sample, there was no way she could determine it was indeed a hoodwinker “with absolute certainty” given that the specimen was “so far away from home”.
She told CNN that all cases of the big fish had, until now, been found in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Chile.
“This is why it’s so intriguing why it has turned up in California. We know it has the temperate distribution around here and off the coast of Chile, but then how did it cross the equator and turn up by you guys?” Nyegaard said.
“It’s intriguing, what made this fish cross the equator.”