Mola Mola! Woah baby!

Imagine for a moment you are boating out across the ocean  on a calm day with barely a ripple on the water, but from time to time you see this large black thing stick up above the surface and kinda pivoting around before disappearing under the water again  then surfacing a few minutes later. You dismiss this first sighting as just a log or other piece of debris floating in a vast ocean. Days later you see it again not once but twice in the same day near the same spot. Moving water rarely allows floating debris to stay in the same place for very long. You decide now is time to make a detour and slowly approach the "waving debris" only to find it attached to a very large floating pancake like looking creature!

Photo By Allen Hack taken in Alaska sourced from Flicker

A giant sunfish swims by just below the surface of the water. The picture that Allan Hack took up in Alaska is similar to the size and shape of those seen swimming recently in the Gulf of Maine in during the summer of 2018.

While these bizarre looking fish are common in temperate and tropical oceans they tend to spend much of their time hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean. I knew there had been quite a few giant sunfish spotted by various tour boats such as mine in and around Frenchman's Bay. So, I did some Googling and came across OceanSunfish.org which has a really cool map where people can log their sightings. Too bad I hadn't known about this sooner or I would have logged all the ones I saw over the summer. Scouring the sunfish shapes I found only one logged sighting from last summer. Coolest sighting was back in the summer of 2007 when 15 swimming in and around a tour boat in  Frenchman's Bay.

If you search through the reports of "odd" fish sightings in local papers around Maine you come across years where so many are spotted they create a newsworthy buzz and other years few reported sightings are spotted. This year one local paper quoted a local captain as saying they spotted as many as twenty sunfish per trip around the Frenchmans Bay area. So why were so many spotted this summer? Scientist have no real concrete answer to this question however, there are a number of theories swirling around. While these fish prefer to spend their time swimming the deep depths from time to time they will surface and swim around gathering heat at the ocean's surface. To maximize the amount of collected heat they will float on their sides to not only expose the a large amount of surface area to the sun. The other benefit to this sun warming is the fish can attract sea birds to it to help remove parasites attached to it's skin.

A second possibility is even after they have warmed up they maybe staying near the surface to eat jellyfish.  Mola molas eat a wide variety of things from algae to small fish and appear to have a thing for eating jellyfish. This year in the Gulf of Maine we had an abundance of jellyfish swimming around. I can say for a fact that this year I saw a number of the lion's mane jellyfish floating around especially out near the lighthouse and a few dead ones washed up on the beach. Come for the heat and stay for the all you can eat jellyfish buffet. One researcher who studies jellyfish populations noted there appear to be more mola mola sightings in the Gulf of Maine during summers when there happen to be jellyfish population booms. Cool huh! While no one knows just how many mola molas there maybe swimming below the surface of Maine waters they are quite the sight to behold and by some accounts maybe just as interested in us as we are in them. Hope to get lucky enough to see one in the future.




Want to know more?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/o/ocean-sunfish/
https://news.mongabay.com/2017/07/new-species-of-giant-sunfish-discovered/
https://mlcalliance.org/2014/09/13/strange-sunfish-seen-in-maine-waters/
https://bangordailynews.com/2018/09/03/environment/mainers-marvel-over-sightings-of-odd-looking-alien-fish/
http://oceansunfish.org/
https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/local/massive-lions-mane-jellyfish-gives-acadia-tourists-a-roaring-sight/97-575129403