Mola mola

Are you ready to MOLA MOLA? Fantastic Fish friend Pier has suggested an absolute wonder of a fish, the weirdly majestic Ocean Sunfish, also called the Mola Mola. To put ourselves in the right frame of mind, please click the following link or listen to any version of the classic song Lola:

Of course, when you listen, be sure to replace each LOLA with 'MOLA'. Perhaps better fitting lyrics might be, "I met her in a wave down in the old bay, where they drink seawater and it tastes just like kissing MOLA / M-O-L-A MOLA'.

Okay, now that we're all listening to 'Mola mola', let's dive in as literally as possible: Behold the Mola mola!

Fun fact: the reason its mouth is always open is because its teeth are fused together!!!!!!!!!! It must be bonkers to be a Mola mola dentist. Just imagine how they would call out which teeth are present; none of that 1d present, 19d missing confusion. Plain and simple: giant ring tooth – present. Done! Nevertheless, I am somewhat sad Mola molas don’t have molars. It would make for a much better surfer necklace than a shark tooth. Like oh, what's this? Oh, that’s just a Mola mola molar. No, neither of us have a stutter. Despite its perpetually open, o-shaped mouth, the Mola mola cannot whistle, which perhaps a good thing for other fish in the ocean.

(Majestic Mola mola, pictured right)

The Mola mola is a fantastic beast with a worldwide distribution. It's one of the heaviest fish around- it can weigh over a ton (1000+ kilos)!!! It's got a very weird fin configuration, with very long dorsal and ventral fins. It's also a very prolific egg-layer. The Mola mola can lay more eggs than any other vertebrate known to man- an ocean sunfish can produce up to 300 million eggs at once. When they hatch, the ocean sunfish larvae are only as big as a pin head! They grow very fast, gaining almost 2 lb (0.9 kg) every day until fully grown. This means that from birth to adulthood it grows more than 60 million times its original size; the same as a human baby growing to weigh as much as six Titanics!

The Mola mola is in the same fish family as the pufferfish, and so baby Mola mola often resemble their pufferfish relatives:

(pictured left: baby Mola Mola. pictured right: a plush hepatitis C)

Like so many other amazing fishes, we see a juvenile form that differs quite markedly from its adult form. I think the baby Mola mola looks like one of those cute little plushies of a virus. Or like a shuriken. Ninja fish throwing star power!

As if amazing development, morphology, and reproductive capacity weren't enough, the Mola mola also exhibits some very neat behavior that explains the origin of the fish's common name, Ocean Sunfish: the ocean gets a little colder than normal at depths of 2,000 ft (600 m), which is how deep a Mola mola can dive. Because of these chilly temperatures, Mola mola may float close to the surface to sunbathe so that they can bring their body temperatures up and convince seabirds to pluck off all the pesky parasites the giant Mola mola attracts on its ocean wanderings. What a way to game the system! As if this weren't cool enough, Ocean Sunfish can eat jellyfish, sea sponges, small fish, squid, crustaceans, and brittle sea stars. The mucus layer of the Mola mola also lines their digestive tracts which may very well be the reason they can digest jellyfish without getting stung.

All this Mola mola talk has me feeling very sunny during this cold winter week- the Ocean Sunfish is a ton of fun (literally!).