Dennis wrote: > > I was paddling between Portsmouth, NH and the Isles of Shoals yesterday with > a couple of friends. ...<snip>... > None of us had ever seen one but we assumed it was a sunfish. Does anybody > know more about these? What is their range? How big do they get? What do > they eat? What eats them? These fish are just plain wierd! The following sites have some great photos as well as various tidbits of information about these large, strange fish. As for your questions, they are widely distributed; they get up to 3000 lbs. (or more?); they eat mainly jellyfish; and they are eaten at times by sea lions (and other large predators?). As with a rudder, if they get stuck on your boat (even a very large ship) they can slow it down substantially. See the story in the last link about the large cement carrier whose speed was slowed from 14 knots to 11 knots when a sunfish got stuck on its bulbous bow. This obviously could not be explained by its effect on wetted surface area. :-) Great photos: http://oceanlight.com/html/mola_mola.html http://www.earthwindow.com/mola.html Other good sites: http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/molidae.html http://www.austmus.gov.au/fish/fishenq/mola.htm What a cool fish! Dan Hagen *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Mon Oct 04 1999 - 06:41:23 PDT
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