Rare Marine Creature Washes Ashore on American Beach

An extremely rare marine creature agreed on an American beach

The marine environment is a world full of surprises. Although it is very close to us most of the time, we know only a tiny part. However, we know how to identify when an animal, or vegetable, marine species is rare.

This is what happened to Stefan Kiesbye, a novelist and English teacher at the State University of Sonoma, California (USA). Each week, he devotes his Sunday morning to cleaning the beaches around Bodega Bay, picking up the waste. But this Sunday, September 07, will forever be engraved in his memory.

As soon as they arrived at the Doran regional park, located in Bodega Bay, it is welcomed by the cries of many sea lions, then heads at the west end of the beach. It is in this specific location that he falls in front of an aquatic creature failed on the sand.

If he has already encountered several dead sea lions during his cleaning sessions, the individual he had in front of him was not one. It was one of the rarest fish on the planet.

It comes across a very rare-moving kind of moon

Indeed, the fish approximately 1.80 meters long by 90 centimeters wide which was lifeless on this beach was a Mola tectawhich literally means hidden moon fish, but better known as the deceptive moon fish, and which is one of the rarest marine species, which can weigh up to 2 tonnes.

Described for the first time in 2017 by a group of New Zealand researchers, this species is so called due to the fact that it remained unidentified for a very long time. It belongs to the family of Molidaejust like the other moonfish, like the Mola molawhich is more common.

The deceptive lane fish is also often confused with the latter, but it presents morphological differences, namely the absence of a prominent muzzle, a smoother and fine body or the absence of “bump on the head or on the chin”, characteristic of adult moon fish according to Dr. Marianne Nyegaard, who led in 2017 the research team having discovered for the first time the misleading.

His presence in California upsets knowledge on her distribution area

If observing a deceptive moon fish is already a rare fact, doing it on a Californian beach is even more so. Indeed, specialists had always thought that this fish was exclusively in the waters of the southern hemisphere (California is located in the northern hemisphere).

“We know that Mola Tecta is present in the current of Humboldt off South America, to Peru in the North, but we did not think that they were crossing the hot equatorial belt, at least not very often”, said Dr. Marianne Nyegaard.

The specialist also explains that it is not uncommon to see moon fish run aground all over the world, although reason is still unknown. “We hope that one day we will know more about the reasons for this phenomenon”says the expert.

Source: The Press Democrat