Shore Buddies Wisdom Wednesday
Picture by: @jim_abernethy
The beautiful Mola Mola, aka Ocean Sunfish, is a bizarre shaped fish that has many very interesting facts about them! They can weigh more than a car; the average ocean sunfish is 10 feet long and weighs 2200 pounds, but the biggest can grow up to 5000 pounds. The average pickup truck is only 4000. This makes them the world's largest bony fish. Sunfish generally hang out at depths of 160 to 650 feet, but they have been found as deep as 2600 feet. They love to sunbathe (Sunfish!). Sunfish spend up to half the day basking in the sun near the surface of the water, which helps warm their bodies up after deep water dives to hunt. Ocean Sunfish lay more eggs than any other vertebrate animal...roughly 300,000,000, and they are voracious predators feeding mostly on jellyfish. In German, they are called “swimming heads”, but they may or may not be plankton. Despite its massive size, the sunfish has been classified for years as a type of plankton, because it seemed to drift with the current rather than swim. (Plankton drift up and down the water column with the current, unable to swim against it.)
http://mentalfloss.com/article/64197/14-fascinating-facts-about-ocean-sunfish