Thought to be 2.7m wide, a creature was photographed by Fish SA Magazine after it was spotted lying dead on the sand at Petrel Cove near Encounter Bay on SA’s south coast. The South Australia Museum said the creature was likely to be a Mola alexandrini, also known as a bump-head sunfish. “You can tell it’s a bump-head sunfish rather than one of the other two types (Mola tecta, the Hoodwinker sunfish and Mola mola, the Ocean sunfish) because of the prominent chin you can see in the photo,” a museum spokesman said.
Sunfish, which can grow as long as three metres and weigh as much as 2000kg, are found worldwide, with the species found at Petrel Cove being one of the most commonly spotted in South Australia.
Curious locals have since flocked to the beach to take photos of the fish, despite it now starting to smell very bad. Social media users have expressed awe as well as sadness over the find. “Amazing. I wonder how prolific (多产的) they are,” one person wrote. “What a shame. They are beautiful. This makes me feel really sad,” said another. Another social media user, Dani Brown, shared a photo of herself lying next to the fish for a size comparison. “This is me with it today – for reference, I’m 164cm tall!” she captioned the photo.
Danish marine biologist Dr Marianne Nyegaard previously said that it was difficult to figure out why the creatures die. “Stranded sunfish typically appear to have been healthy with no obvious cause of death, or impairment to explain why they ended up on the beach,” Dr Nyegaard said.
The sighting comes years after a Mola mola, or ocean sunfish, made news across the world when it washed up near the mouth of the Murray River in South Australia in 2019. At the time, Linette Grzelak, shared a photo of the creature to social media after her partner spotted the fish, which had already died, while out fishing. “A sunfish found by my partner along the Coorong a couple nights ago ... I thought it was fake,” the post read.
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