MEXICO: A dead oarfish has washed ashore on Catalina Island, roughly 22 miles (35 kilometers) off the coast of Los Angeles. It’s the fifth of the mysterious deep-sea creatures to flop onto West Coast beaches within the past year.
Tyler Dvorak with the Catalina Island Conservancy spied the carcass while scanning a beach on the northeastern end of Catalina with binoculars on June 1. “I knew what it was immediately because of the one that washed up last year,” the biologist says.
“It was a pretty weird thing to see,” says Dvorak, who photographed it while his colleague contacted researchers in Los Angeles, who were eventually able to collect parts of the 14-foot (4.3-meter) long animal.
The fish could have been even longer, but it appeared to be missing its tail, says David Chan, director of the Pennington Marine Science Center, who dissected it for future study by scientists at California State University, Fullerton and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.
Missing tails aren’t unusual for oarfish, writes Tyson Roberts in the book Systematics, Biology, and Distribution of the Species of the Oceanic Oarfish Genus Regalecus. The animals are able to pop them off in a process known as autotomy. It’s similar to the way certain lizards can amputate their own tails when threatened with a predator.
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