Ocean sunfish
Mola mola
— Where the name comes from
Mola is the millstone: the Romans saw the round grey stone in that discus of a body. In other languages the image of the moon won out instead — the German Mondfisch — or of the sun, in the English sunfish.
— Facts
- Group
- Fish · Actinopterygii · Chondrichthyes
- Order
- Pufferfishes
- Habitat
- Open ocean, from the surface to 600 m
- Range
- All temperate and tropical seas
- Size
- Up to 3.3 m and 2,300 kg
- Diet
- Mostly jellyfish and salps
- Lifespan
- about 10 years (an uncertain estimate)
— Characteristics
- 01
The heaviest bony fish in the world.
- 02
It has no true tail fin: the body ends in a clavus.
- 03
Lets itself drift on its side at the surface to warm up and be cleaned by gulls.
— What sets it apart
A female sunfish can carry 300 million eggs, more than any other vertebrate known. The newly hatched larva measures 2.5 millimetres and is covered in spines: as an adult it will weigh over a tonne. That is a growth of roughly sixty million times — no other vertebrate changes scale like that between birth and maturity.
