Lately we have had an influx of jellyfish along our coastline. Following the abundant food supply the sunfish have arrived in large numbers.
So on Friday I went to sea again from Hout Bay with Steve Benjamin (http://www.animalocean.co.za) in the company of photographers Geoff Spiby and Mark Van Coller. The water was looking good with 20m viz until we rounded Llandudno... then the water turned to the consistency of a light pea soup. As we were about to turn around Steve spotted some sunfish or Mola mola. These guys look clumsy and slow (in fact they look like they cannot even swim properly), but boy can they motor when they want to! Every time we jumped into the water and swam towards them they would turn away and quickly disappear with a deceptively fast pace. The curious thing is that we could get right next to them with the boat and they made no move to swim away. As soon as a diver entered the water they would bolt. In the end we adopted the approach of having Steve drive right next to an individual fish while the 3 of us would hook our feet into the Rib's tank rack and lean over the side which made for some interesting manouvers! Not a very successful photo opportunity but good for a few laughs... I also had one opportunity to slide over the side straight off the pontoon and directly at the sunfish, but again they reacted very quickly.
Here is Geoff Spiby's shot of me as I slid over the side straight at the sunfish...
Regards
Jean.
Hi Jean!
Sounds like You had an interesting day nonetheless. And You got some shot's as well
It's funny that I allso have looked at mola molas as slow moving fishes, but then again - we all have some tricks up the sleeve
Cheers
Karel
Went to an excellent talk last week on Mola mola by an old friend from my undergrad days, who works on them.
They have just written a new review paper on Mola mola and are doing some very interesting work on them. For those interested in them - keep an eye on the scientific literature over the next few years. Although he admits that saying you are an expert on Mola mola is a bit like claiming to be an expert on unicorns, I thought I had read most of what was known and his talk massively increased my knowledge of them.
Alex
Those things look more alien to me than many of the invertebrates or deep-sea creatures. Something about them being vaguely fish-like but with that truncated back end and no tail....kind of like the 'uncanny valley' they talk about trying to overcome with digital representation of people's faces: they can get so close, but so much of our visual processing is based on social evolution and reading facial cues that it triggers some almost atavistic fear response instead.
Fascinating. I'd love to see one someday in person.
