A creature dubbed a ‘doomsday fish’ was discovered by snorkelers and kayakers off the Southern California coast.
The group spotted a 12-foot oarfish – dead – in La Jolla Cove on August 10.
‘To give you an idea of how rare this encounter is, only 20 oarfish have washed up in California since 1901!’ Scripps Institution of Oceanography wrote in a Facebook post.
Images showed the long, serpent-like marine animal floating at the surface of the ocean alongside smiling swimmers and a kayaker.
The strange creature had a silvery color with gray and black spots along its back and red hair-like strips growing from its forehead.
Oarfish have been nicknamed ‘doomsday fish’ because ‘in some areas of the world, these creatures are seen as being harbingers of bad news, particularly disasters or destruction’, according to the Ocean Conservancy.
‘The legend is that if you see an oarfish, it is a warning sign from higher powers that disasters such as earthquakes are soon to occur,’ stated the conservancy.
In Japan, 20 oarfish reportedly washed ashore just before a devastating earthquake in 2011.
The group of sea enthusiasts, with assistance from California Sea Grant and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service members, contacted lifeguards to take the fish to a NOAA facility.
There, scientists will conduct a necropsy to try to determine the creature’s cause of death.
‘Thanks to the work from these locals, scientists will be able to further study this mysterious species as it will become part of the Marine Vertebrate Collection at Scripps, one of the largest collections of deep-sea fish in the world,’ Scripps assistant director of communications Brittany Hook told KXAN.
Anyone who comes across a ‘fishy find’ is encouraged to notify lifeguards and the Scripps institution.
It is not the only weird fish to turn up off the US coast recently.
The ‘doomsday fish’ was found a couple of months after a rare, round 7.3-foot long hoodwinker sunfish washed ashore Oregon’s northern coast. The species first known to humans in 2017 have been seen only a few times in the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. Unlike the oarfish, they have not been linked to the end of the world.
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