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Saturday, March 20, 2004 Floating Heads I was flipping through an old copy of National Geographic (quickly passing the pictures of H.R. Giger-like deformed fetuses from nuclear fallout) when I halted at some bright blue pages. In the middle of the underwater photograph was a giant floating fish head with a suction-like mouth rimmed with parasites. The caption said something about the worse this fish could do to you was to give you a giant hickey. Fascinatingly gross. The floating head was an example of a Mola mola or ocean sunfish, found worldwide and is the largest bony fish on record. Although sunfish larva start out about one-tenth of an inch, by the time it's an adult, it may be as large as 14 feet across and 60 million times its starting weight. A researcher for sunfish, Tierney Thys, compares it to "the equivalent of a healthy, bouncing human baby growing to a weight equal to six Titanics." The reason why the sunfish is so round is that it's completely missing its tail fin. Rather, its propulsion is aided by the clavus which is part of the dorsal and anal fin rays. Some people might mistake it for a shark because of its large dorsal fin, but it's quite harmless to humans (unless you want to eat it--the sunfish is poisonous, not surprising since it's related to the pufferfish) and its diet mainly consists of jellyfish. Side note: Apparently the sunfish is also used in Chinese medicine although I couldn't find any sites that definitively said what it was used for. However, there are a few obscure studies on the prophylactic effects of Mola mola bile salts and lipids on lesions. Unfortunately, those studies are pretty old and I couldn't find any abstracts. Nowadays, the research is more focused on the Mola mola genome and the fish's migration patterns. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 8:42 AM : ]
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