A sunfish that washed ashore in California has been positively identified as the newly discovered hoodwinker sunfish, previously known only to exist in the Southern Hemisphere.
The extremely rare hoodwinker sunfish, a.k.a. Mola tecta, had never been seen in the Northern Hemisphere until it washed up dead last week at UC Santa Barbara’s Coal Oil Point Reserve in Goleta.
It was first believed to be a mola mola, a sunfish commonly known to swim the Santa Barbara Channel. But after a series of online posts and emails, and coordination with Marianne Nyegaard, the Australian sunfish expert who discovered the hoodwinker sunfish in 2017, the reserve was able to announce the first-ever discovery in a news release Wednesday in The Current.
Thomas Turner, an associate professor in UC Santa Barbara’s ecology, evolution and marine biologist department, took photos of the sunfish and posted them on iNaturalist, a community for scientists pursuing species identifications. They caught the eyes of Nyegaard and ichthyologist Ralph Foster of the South Australian Museum.
“I thought that the fish surely looked an awful lot like a hoodwinker, but frustratingly, none of the many photos showed the clavus [a diagnostic feature] clearly,” Nyegaard explained via email, according to The Current. “And with a fish so far out of range, I was extremely reluctant to call it a hoodwinker without clear and unambiguous evidence of its identity.
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“I just couldn’t be sure due to pixilation and kept thinking I was totally being hoodwinked by this stranded sunfish. I emailed a bit with Ralph, and we discussed how this fish would have been a dead-set hoodwinker had it been within range in the temperate Southern Hemisphere. But I felt I needed to be absolutely 100 percent sure before settling on an ID, seeing as I had described the hoodwinker and would need to back up my ID with absolute certainty with a specimen so far away from home.”
Given specific instructions, Turner and Jessica Nielsen, a conservation specialist at the reserve who first took photos of the sunfish, returned to the carcass to get additional photos and take samples for Nyegaard.
“Jessica took a fin sample to send to Marianne for DNA, and I took pictures of the field marks,” Turner said, according to The Current. “It was iNaturalist at its best: experienced novice loops in expert, who loops in the expert, who then helps us learn about our find and gets information she will use in her research. And it was fun and exciting for all.”
Nyegaard said she nearly fell off her chair upon receiving the information, and had no doubt it was a hoodwinker sunfish.
“They had…examined the clavus by hand to confirm the number of ossicles, which was just brilliant,” Nyegaard said.
Nyegaard named the sunfish based on its elusive nature. It was the first addition to the Mola genus in 125 years.
How this one ended up so far out of its known range is a mystery, but the identification is considered a first crucial step.
“Without attentive eyes, camera phones and social media, the Australian ichthyologists would have never learned that this fish had just been seen for the first time in the Northern Hemisphere,” Cris Sandoval, director of Coal Oil Point Reserve, said, according to The Current. “This type of crowd-sourced science is helping biologists map species in ways we could not have imagined just a few years ago.”
Photos courtesy of Thomas Turner.
