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.
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