Scientists Shocked By Rare, Giant Sunfish Washed Up On California Beach February 28, 20196:22 PM ET
February 28, 20196:22 PM ET
Merrit Kennedy 2018 square
MERRIT KENNEDY
The animal, identified as a hoodwinker sunfish, washed up on a shore last week at UC Santa Barbara's Coal Oil Point Reserve.
Thomas Turner
Stumbling upon a seven-foot-long sunfish while walking on a beach is already pretty surprising.
But what researchers initially thought was a common type of sunfish turned out to be much rarer – a newly discovered species thought to make its home almost entirely in the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere. This was in Santa Barbara, Calif. — much further north than anyone expected to find it.
"I literally, nearly fell off my chair," Marianne Nyegaard of Murdoch University in Australia said in a statement. Nyegaard, a sunfish expert, discovered and described the Mola tecta sunfish — commonly known as the hoodwinker sunfish — in 2017.
The more common Mola mola ocean sunfish is known to swim in the Santa Barbara Channel. The hoodwinker has only been found in the Southern Hemisphere, aside from just one known example that washed up in The Netherlands in 1889.
More:
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/699004730/scientists-shocked-by-rare-giant-sunfish-washed-up-on-california-beach
Mola tecta sunfish
Mola tecta
Meet the new giant sunfish that has evaded scientists for centuries
by Shreya Dasgupta on 24 July 2017
The massive ocean sunfish — an odd-looking fish with a flat, rigid, tailless body — is not only the world’s largest bony fish, but also one of the most elusive fishes in the world.
More:
https://news.mongabay.com/2017/07/new-species-of-giant-sunfish-discovered/
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