For the second time this year an oarfish, a rarely seen deep sea fish that has historically been considered a harbinger of doom, washed up on the California coastline.
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, reported that last week that one of its PhD students came across a specimen roughly nine to 10ft long on a beach in Encinitas in southern California.
The creatures, which have long, ribbon-shaped bodies, typically live in an area of the deep sea called the mesopelagic zone, where light cannot reach. They are sometimes called doomsday fish due to their mythical reputation as predictors of natural disasters or earthquakes; 20 oarfish were found on beaches in Japan in the months before the 2011 earthquake.
This month’s discovery comes just a few months after a group of kayakers and snorkelers off the San Diego coast came across a 12ft-long oarfish floating dead in the water.
It’s an unusual occurrence. Oarfish have only been documented washing up in California 20 times since 1901, Ben Frable, a fish expert with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in a statement in August. Changes in ocean conditions and increased numbers of oarfish might be behind the sightings, he said this week.
Frable explained researchers had pointed at broader shifts such as El Niño and La Niña patterns to explain a rise in sightings, though it appears those conditions aren’t always identifiable and many variables could lead to the strandings.
Researchers took samples and froze the oarfish recovered this week for further study and eventual preservation in the institution’s marine vertebrate collection. Scientists also studied the washed-up oarfish from August. An autopsy then allowed researchers to analyze its organs and generate the “first high-quality, chromosome-level genome”.
