#Pacific football fish newport beach full

“It’s a bucket-list fish that I thought would be wonderful but impossible ever to get,” he said. That’s how Dwight Hwang felt, too. He’s an Orange County-based gyotaku artist, who makes fish prints. The scientists agreed that the footballfish bonanza was probably just luck.

#Pacific football fish newport beach full

The fish Estes found had an empty stomach the December fish was full of sand. Ludt, at the museum, thinks it’s possible that the fish are gathering somewhere to breed, then dying. Was it oil spills, ocean-dumped DDT, sonic booms? “People on the Internet are coming up with Marvel-movie-style theories about why.” “Why are these deep-sea fish washing up on the beach?” Scripps’s Frable wondered. The triple stranding is also a head-scratcher. Even less is known about its behavior, as one has never been observed at depth. Clardy and Ludt have already discovered a previously unknown feature of the fish: in addition to bioluminescence, it appears capable of fluorescence. Little is known about the species’ biology. You don’t know when the next opportunity will come.” “The whole point of this is, whenever they encounter something they can possibly eat, gotta be able to capture it-don’t let it get away-and eat it. “Several rows of nice sharp teeth.” In the throat, more teeth. “She’s basically a swimming head,” he said. That fish went to Scripps and became one of about thirty specimens worldwide.Ĭlardy put on a rubber glove and eased the footballfish out: fifteen inches of tarry blob, with a startling underbite.

“There was a ‘weird deep-sea fish, like what was in the news,’ ” Frable said. In December, a colleague at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration passed Frable another tip out of San Diego. “I didn’t get any information, just ‘There’s this weird fish-can you identify it?’ ” But, by the time he went to check it out, it had been scavenged or had washed back out to sea. “Fast-forward to November, and I get an e-mail from a local news station.” Another Pacific footballfish had washed up, this time in San Diego. “It was pretty exciting to see such a rare anglerfish,” Ben Frable, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said. The last time a Pacific footballfish had been collected in California was in 2001.

The ichthyology world was stoked about Estes’s find. (The males are tiny, lightless, possibly toothless, and even harder to find.) Its close cousins are the seadevils (spiny, prickly, warty) more distantly, it’s related to the frogfish, the batfish, and the sea toad. The creature was a female Pacific footballfish, an exceedingly rare deep-sea anglerfish that lives thousands of feet underwater, in the midnight zone, and sports a bioluminescent lure that it uses to attract prey. It’s the monster-looking fish that chased Nemo around,’ ” Estes recalled. When Estes showed his family some pictures he had taken, his daughter, who was four when “Finding Nemo” came out, recognized the creature right away. Later, he learned that the mouth is designed to swallow prey whole. “Its mouth just opened really wide, a slow eeer,” Estes said, making the sound of a door opening on creaky hinges. He adjusted the crazy-looking head tassel. And that thing that was hanging off its head, it looked pretty crazy. “Its mouth had some teeth you could almost see through. “It looked like a deflated black balloon that had thorns on it,” he said. One morning in May, Ben Estes, a retired Hollywood grip (“Terminator,” “True Lies”) and a lifelong surf caster, was walking on the beach in Orange County when he came upon something weird. He hopes to add the Newport Beach discovery for future researchers.A Pacific footballfish Illustration by João Fazenda The museum has only three specimens of this species of anglerfish in its collection of about 3 million fish, Ludt said, and only one is from California. “It’s not something that comes up too often, especially in the condition that it’s in,” Ludt said. The anglerfish is a rare species, Ludt said, and he found it unusual for one to wash ashore. Still, the sight of the fish surprised some experts for its near-perfect condition. “I couldn’t speculate on how it ended up on the beach, but it is not entirely uncommon for deep-water species to occasionally do so,” Ugoretz wrote in an email. penis fish) washed up elsewhere.Īs of Monday morning, the fish was frozen at Crystal Cove State Park while state officials sorted out where it would ultimately be placed, according to John Ugoretz of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. California Penis fish and sea pickles: Weird creatures wash ashore amid Northern California stormsĪfter odd sea creatures washed ashore, the Monterey Bay Aquarium said they were sea pickles.