Large, odd-looking fish washes ashore in California. ‘So weird and gorgeous’
.jpeg "An odd-looking fish washed ashore in Sonoma County, officials say.")
Park visitors were peering at the water near a California jetty when something caught their eye: large gray creatures lurking below.
Fearing the animals may be sharks, multiple visitors called Sonoma County Regional Parks about the animals they spotted in Doran Regional Park in Bodega Bay, park officials said in a Sept. 10 Facebook post.
However, officials said arriving rangers soon realized the “unexpected visitors” were not sharks at all.
Instead, “the animals were quickly identified as sunfish, a type of open-water (or ‘pelagic’) fish,” officials said.
The Press Democrat first reported the sighting, sending photos to Marianne Nyegaard, a New Zealand based researcher, who confirmed the fish to be Mola tecta.
Nyegaard identified the Mola tecta, or hoodwinker sunfish, as a new species in 2017.
“This is a very rare sighting for our coast,” officials said.
Park officials said Mola tecta are “often mistaken for its more common cousin, Mola mola.”
One of the fish died and ended up beached near the jetty, according to officials.
“It’s sad that it’s been washed to shore,” Stefan Kiesbye, who snapped the photos sent to Nyegaard, told The Press Democrat. “But it was so enormous and so weird and gorgeous. It’s like suddenly you’re on another planet.”
Photos shared by the park show the large, odd-looking fish lying in the sand on the shore.
“It was pretty jarring,” Ariana Reguzzo, spokesperson for Sonoma County Parks, told SF Gate of seeing the Mola tecta.
The fish’s carcass will be handled by local wildlife agencies, who will “take over, returning nutrients back into the ecosystem,” officials said.
Bodega Bay is about a 70-mile drive north from San Francisco.
