Do Not Mess With Fish 277,

and you thought fish were fun!

photographs by Atlantic Naturalist.org, well it is not fun is you hit one of these carcasses at sea, the carcass was weighed with a crane scale dynamometer that allowed for accurate measurements, at 6,049 pounds, the giant fish, a sunfish, (Mola alexandrine), was nearly a thousand pounds heavier than the previous Guinness World Record holder for the heaviest bony fish, of the same species, which was caught near Japan in 1996,

according to Gomes-Pereira, who is lead author of a study publishing the findings in the Journal of Fish Biology, the discovery is both a cause for hope, as well as a warning, “It means that the marine ecosystem is still healthy enough to sustain these large animals,” he says, a little about the fish, The animals can be 10 feet long and tend to enjoy sunbathing. But scientists still have a lot of unanswered questions about these curious creatures, “We don't know how long they live or how fast they grow in the wild,” says Tierney Thys, a marine biologist with the California Academy of Sciences and a National Geographic Explorer. “We also don't have a good sense of how many individuals there are in the world or how big regional populations are.” as far as the record-breaking animal, it was likely female and 20 years old or more, says Thys, who is also the founder of the Adopt A Sunfish Program, “Mola alexandrini is truly one of the ocean's great oddballs and while its external appearance may seem somewhat awkward and cumbersome, it is in fact a gentle giant and swims through the water with surprisingly graceful winglike strokes,” she says, what a fascinating creature, for the full article have a look here.