This is a sunfish in a Japanese aquarium. It became lonely after visitors stopped during renovations and refused to eat and rubbed its body against the tank walls showing stress, then started eating again within a day after staff placed human face cutouts near its tank.
This is a sunfish in a Japanese aquarium. It became lonely after visitors stopped during renovations and refused to eat and rubbed its body against the tank walls showing stress, then started eating again within a day after staff placed human face cutouts near its tank.
Discussion
that's so damn cute. I remember playing a phone game(?) called mola mola that was about these guys. was pretty funny
In the BBC article it mentioned that their scientific name is actually mola mola.
The scientific name for sunfish is mola mola
Mola in Latin means 'millstone'
It's cute, but also very sad. Bro has nothing but a tank. Take the people away and he has only despair
Reminds me of reports of zoo animals having issues of loneliness and boredom when zoos were closed due to Covid lockdowns.
Them watching us watching them seems to be part of how they entertain themselves.
It makes sense. Even the best zoos/aquariums can only offer a tiny fraction of a wild animal's territorial range so I imagine their life is much smaller than they're designed for. A lot less stress and danger for sure but the trade off is far less input
People get to safely see the animals. Animals get to safely see people. Zoos work both ways.
This is extremely interesting
Hank Green just put out a good video about these guys if you want to know more. ☀️ 🐠
It's got a sort of inspiring and wholesome sub theme too if you stick around for the end in which he compares himself to a sunfish. Worth a watch!
Oh!
Put a camera feed on there lets us dial in and visit. The world would love to pop in and visit the lovely Sunfish .
I’ll be honest from way over here it looks like a shark. But whatever.
IIRC there was an aquarium that did that during the pandemic, I think it was for their garden eels
They could hook up a tablet showing Omegle, allowing anyone to randomly connect and video with the fish!
That’ll really make it lose all hope.
"Where'd the zoo go? I'm so bored." - the fish?
Yes. It’s a human aquarium. We even pay for it, and feed him. 🤯
Yup. The visitors were a form of enrichment for the sunfish and nobody realised until it was removed.
It makes me smile thinking the fish at my local aquarium might actually enjoy seeing the steady stream of strange creatures going through the transparent tunnel each day.
Summoning the infamous sunfish copypasta
Condensed copypasta:
The ocean sunfish, or Mola mola, is nature's greatest joke. This stupid fucking fish can grow up to 5,000 pounds and has no tail. It just has a big flap. It uses its big stupid flap to swim. It eats jellyfish almost exclusively, which have no nutritional value, so the sunfish just has to eat constantly. It is the world's largest bony fish and it is completely useless. It can't defend itself. Sharks take bites out of it just for fun. Orcas literally use it as a frisbee. It gets so many parasites that it will beach itself just to let birds eat the bugs off of it. It frequently dies from getting stung by jellyfish — the only thing it eats. It dies of stress when seagulls look at it. It is the most pathetic creature in the ocean. It evolved from a pufferfish and somehow became worse. The ocean sunfish has no business being alive, and yet there it is, just flopping around in the ocean, being enormous and useless.
Copypasta:
I hate the Sunfish
So someone in a group asked me to tell them why I hate the ocean sunfish so much, and apparently it was ~too mean~ and was deleted. To perpetuate the truth and stand up for ethical journalism, I'm posting it here. [Rated NC-17 for language.]
Disclaimer, I care about marine life more than I care about anything else, for real. Except this big dumb idiot. And it's not like an ~ironic~ thing, I mean it IS hilarious to me and they ARE THE BIGGEST JOKE PLAYED ON EARTH but I seriously fucking hate them.
THE MOLA MOLA FISH (OR OCEAN SUNFISH)
They are the world's largest boney fish, weighing up to 5,000 pounds. And since they have very little girth, that just makes them these absolutely giant fucking dinner plates that God must have accidentally dropped while washing dishes one day and shrugged his shoulders at because no one could have imagined this would happen. AND WITH NO PURPOSE. EVERY POUND OF THAT IS A WASTED POUND AND EVERY FOOT OF IT (10 FT BY 14 FT) IS WASTED SPACE.
They are so completely useless that scientists even debate about how they move. They have little control other than some minor wiggling. Some say they must just push water out of their mouths for direction (?????). They COULD use their back fin EXCEPT GUESS WHAT IT DOESNT FUCKING GROW. It just continually folds in on itself, so the freaking cells are being made, this piece of floating garbage just doesn't put them where they need to fucking go.
So they don't have swim bladders. You know, the one thing that every fish has to make sure it doesn't just sink to the bottom of the ocean when they stop moving and can stay the right side up. This creature. That can barely move to begin with. Can never stop its continuous tour of idiocy across the ocean or it'll fucking sink. EXCEPT. EXCEPT. When they get stuck on top of the water! Which happens frequently! Because without the whole swim bladder thing, if the ocean pushes over THE THINNEST BUT LARGEST MOST TOPPLE-ABLE FISH ON THE PLANET, shit outta luck! There is no creature on this earth that needs a swim bladder more than this spit in the face of nature, AND YET. Some scientists have speculated that when they do that, they are absorbing energy from the sun because no one fucking knows how they manage to get any real energy to begin with. So they need the sun I guess. But good news, when they end up stuck like that, it gives birds a chance to land on their goddamn island of a body and eat the bugs and parasites out of its skin because it's basically a slowly migrating cesspool. Pros and cons.
"If they are so huge, they must at least be decent predators." No. No. The most dangerous thing about them is, as you may have guessed, their stupidity. They have caused the death of one person before. Because it jumped onto a boat. On a human. And in 2005 it decided to relive its mighty glory days and do it again, this time landing on a four-year-old boy. Luckily Byron sustained no injuries. Way to go, fish. Great job.
They mostly only eat jellyfish because of course they do, they could only eat something that has no brain and a possibility of drifting into their mouths I guess. Everything they do eat has almost zero nutritional value and because it's so stupidly fucking big, it has to eat a ton of the almost no nutritional value stuff to stay alive. Dumb. See that ridiculous open mouth? (This is actually why this is my favorite picture of one, and I have had it saved to my phone for three years) "Oh no! What could have happened! How could this be!" Do not let that expression fool you, they just don't have the goddamn ability to close their mouths because their teeth are fused together, and ya know what, it is good it floats around with such a clueless expression on its face, because it is in fact clueless as all fuck.
They do SOMETIMES get eaten though. BUT HARDLY. No animal truly uses them as a food source, but instead (which has lead us to said photo) will usually just maim the fuck out of them for kicks. Seals have been seen playing with their fins like frisbees. Probably the most useful thing to ever come from them.
"Wow, you raise some good points here, this fish truly is proof that God has abandoned us." Yes, thank you. "But if they're so bad at literally everything, why haven't they gone extinct." Great question.
BECAUSE THIS THING IS SO WORTHLESS IT DOESNT REALIZE IT SHOULD NOT EXIST. IT IS SO UNAWARE OF LITERALLY FUCKING EVERYTHING THAT IT DOESNT REALIZE THAT IT'S DOING MAYBE THE WORST FUCKING JOB OF BEING A FISH, OR DEBATABLY THE WORST JOB OF BEING A CLUSTER OF CELLS THAN ANY OTHER CLUSTER OF CELLS. SO WHAT DOES IT DO? IT LAYS THE MOST EGGS OUT OF EVERYTHING. Besides some bugs, there are some ants and stuff that'll lay more. IT WILL LAY 300 MILLION EGGS AT ONE TIME. 300,000,000. IT SURVIVES BECAUSE IT WOULD BE STATISTICALLY IMPROBABLE, DARE I SAY IMPOSSIBLE, THAT THERE WOULDNT BE AT LEAST ONE OF THOSE 300,000,000 (that is EACH time they lay eggs) LEFT SURVIVING AT THE END OF THE DAY.
And this concludes why I hate the fuck out of this complete failure of evolution, the Ocean Sunfish. If I ever see one, I will throw rocks at it.
Is this the same person who hates koalas? Lol
Don't forget the rebuttal to this rant!
I hate that rant so much.
Scientists don't debate how molas move. They swim just fine, like other fish. Also, I love how later in the rant, he's like, "Molas can jump into boats." If molas are so bad at swimming, then how the hell can they jump into boats? Do they have telekinesis or something?
Plenty of fish don't have swim bladders, like sharks and sting rays, for example. So are they failures of evolution, too?
Molas don't get stuck at the surface of the water. They just like to chill out there sometimes, either because they're warming up in the sun, or because they're letting birds pick parasites off their skin. And no, molas aren't "migrating cess pools" because they have parasites on their skin. Lots of fish do. So much so that many creatures evolved to clean parasites off the skin of other fish, like cleaner shrimp and the bluestreak cleaner wrasse.
Also, I like how he's like, "We don't know how they get energy" and then a few sentences later is like, "they're stupid because they eat jellyfish." Which is it, man, do we know how they get their energy or don't we? Also, sea turtles eat jellyfish. Jellyfish eat other jellyfish. Are they all deserving of our derision now?
The majority of enormous animals on this planet aren't predators. See: the blue whale and elephants. Also, most huge animals eat a ton of low nutritional food. Again, see: elephants and grasses.
Mola teeth are fused together, but their whole order, Tetraodontiformes, have fused teeth. It's the top teeth that are fused with other top teeth, and the bottom teeth are fused with other bottom teeth. He seems to imply that the top teeth of the mola are fused to the bottom teeth, which makes zero fucking sense.
Also, and I can't believe I have to say this, but it's a good thing that very few other animals eat molas. Like. Being utterly useless to everything around you is one of the greatest survival strategies on this planet.
The reproductive strategy that molas use is called broadcast spawning, and lots of ocean creatures do. Sponges do it, bivalves do it, worms do it, echinoderms do it, corals do it, and fish do it. Sure, molas release a lot of eggs, but...that is also a sign of a good evolutionary strategy, not a failed one. Eggs take A LOT of energy to produce and the fact that molas can release 300,000,000 of them and be left unscathed is impressive. I'd imagine that if you could ask a coral or a sponge if they'd like to be able to release 300,000,000 eggs into the water every time they spawned and suffer no ill effects, they'd be like, "Hell fucking yeah!"
They look like they're really stupid but they're actually quite clever. Their whole order, Tetraodontiformes, is full of stupid-looking but actually clever fish: boxfish, filefish, pufferfish, etc.
Aquariums that keep molas have been able to successfully train them on target feeding, which is when an animals learns to associate food with a target, so when that target appears in their tank, the animal knows to swim over so they can be fed by hand. This was believed to be something that only "smarter" animals can do, like seals and sea lions.
I once got to see some molas be target fed at an aquarium, and they were just little baby ones (well, I say "little," but they were actually quite big. They were little for molas!) and it was so cute. The two molas were just sorta cruising around the tank, but then spotted some keepers lowering their targets into the water (each mola had their own unique targets). They both spun around and swam right towards the targets. One of them, in it's excitement, accidentally swam into a blue fin tuna and ricocheted off of it. Both the mola and the tuna seemed unphased by this collision, and I like to imagine that happens all the time lolllll.
Molas are such dorks. I love them so much.
Better watch out. Hank Green will find you.
Sunfish are surprisingly intelligent, built to dive deep, can swim surprisingly fast, and in fact actively hunt for creatures like fish and squid. They have multiple symbiotic relationships with cleaner fish and even seagulls, and are generally unpalatable to predators, which is a genuine survival strategy, not to mention most predators don't want to fuck with a fish the size of a car. They've clearly found their niche and settled into it, and sentiment like this only fuels the Tierzoo-ass logic that one must be somehow active-er and less superficially dumb to be "worthy" as a species. All these takes on them being failures of evolution while completely ignoring that, in the seas, their glorious Molidae lineage has outlived the Megalodon and all of the giant predator whales that coexisted with them. No matter the badassery of a giant agile predator that these types of people would probably think of when considering "effective sea creatures", they didn't make it through changing climates and cooling environments.
The sunfish did.
No, fuck that copypasta and fuck you for summoning it. It's full of bullshit and has contributed to people actually harming sunfish, which are great animals that deserve better.
It’s a baby fuckin wheel!
I love that someone thought of doing this for the fish. I imagine life in captivity like that has few interesting things to stimulate the fishes' brains.
It's really interesting to see that the fish responded so well to the ruse, indicating that he has emotional needs nobody realized before. It's wonderful that somebody recognized that and came up with a good plan to help him out.
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