They need a bigger boat.
Researchers in Portugal have discovered the largest bony fish ever, weighing as much as 3 tons.
The giant ocean sunfish (Mola mola) was found dead and floating near Faial Island. Researchers from the Atlantic Naturalist Association and Azores University were able to land the fish and then needed a forklift and crane to lift it onto a scale.
One of the researchers, José Nuno Gomes-Pereira, told CNN Tuesday he was sad “to see the animal in this situation because it must have been a king of the open ocean.”
Previously, the heaviest reported sunfish and Guinness Book of World Records holder was found in Japan in 1996. But she weighed just under 2.5 tons.
The Portuguese sunfish was 3 meters long and 3 meters high. The silver-grey fish has a small mouth and large eyes that disappear into an even larger body with a truncated tail. The gender has not yet been determined.
The Mola species is the world’s heaviest bony fish. But there are bigger fish in the sea with cartilage instead of bones, like sharks and rays. For example, the whale shark is ten times larger than the sunfish.
Photo by Alexis Rosenfeld/Getty Images
