Happy World Oarfish Day!
what a weird fish
World Oarfish Day is June 24!
Now, you might say to me, “Ozy, this post is going out on June 25, which is clearly not World Oarfish Day.” Shhhh. My failure is a secret, just between the two thousand of us.
Oarfish are very long, the longest known bony fish. The average oarfish is about ten feet long, but some have been found up to 36 (some sources say 56) feet long. That is a Very Long Fish.
Unlike most fish, oarfish orient themselves vertically rather than horizontally. I was going to say that some people call it the philosopher fish, because it’s always staring up at the stars. But when I Googled I discovered that apparently the philosopher fish is sturgeon and I haven’t bought the book to figure out what is philosophical about it. Anyway, some people is me and I say that the oarfish’s rightful title is philosopher fish, because it stares at the stars, and I don’t know what sturgeon do other than produce unreasonably expensive eggs which doesn’t strike me an especially philosophical activity.
Oarfish can’t actually see the stars, because the mesopelagic zone is too deep, but looking constantly at the universe that you have no way to see is even more philosophical.
They are actually called doomsday fish because you’re more likely to spot them before natural disasters such as earthquakes, so they warn of coming trouble. Much like philosophers!
Legends of sea serpents may have come from oarfish spottings or their bodies washing up on the beach.1 Even today—though we know they aren’t snakes—we know very little about oarfish. They live in the mesopelagic zone—660 feet to 3,300 feet below sea level, where less than 1% of light penetrates—which humans can only really study with robots. We’ve learned most of what we know about oarfish through studying their dead bodies. Oarfish sightings are extraordinarily rare:
As the Global Oarfish Council—founders of World Oarfish Day—point out, we don’t have answers to numerous basic questions about the oarfish:
How long can an oarfish get?
Why are oarfish long?
Why are oarfish vertical?
Do oarfish engage in social behavior?
How do they find mates, given that there are relatively few oarfish per square mile?
How does the oarfish get enough krill to feed itself, given that it doesn’t move very fast and is also extremely long so it needs lots of krill?
How exactly do oarfish eat squid?
I think oarfish are among the most cosmic-horror of bony fishes, who are already an unusually cosmic-horror taxon. Here are my reasons:
Oarfish are very big, which is de rigeur for a cosmic-horror entity.
Oarfish eat squid, which means they are tentacle-adjacent, which is also de rigeur for a cosmic horror entity.
Oarfish live in the mesopelagic zone, which is large and dark and even though it covers literally 60% of earth’s surface we understand very little about it. There could be anything down there. Creepy.2
Oarfish are an omen of disaster.
Even though oarfish are found throughout the world, we know almost nothing about them, which is a humbling reminder of the vastness of man’s ignorance.
People told superstitious legends about oarfish which, although false and misleading, contained truths dismissed by men of science who scoffed that “sea serpents aren’t real” “sea serpents can’t hurt you” “surely we would know if there are giant snakes in the water.”
Oarfish are constantly looking up towards the cosmos that have no way to see or understand. Even that which is alien to us is alien to the universe.
It does kind of look like a serpent, doesn’t it?
Not as creepy as the abyssopelagic and hadopelagic zones, which even have names that sound like they were made up for a horror novel.
You know what else sturgeons do! They can somehow reproduce with paddlefish to create a hybrid known as "sturddlefish", even though it seems like sturgeons and paddlefish would be too distantly related for this to be possible!
...why is June 24 world oarfish day?
"Not as creepy as the abyssopelagic and hadopelagic zones, which even have names that sound like they were made up for a horror novel"
By weird coincidence I played a game called Dredge a while back, which introduced me to abyssal and hadal depths as a concept. It's a... Lovecraftian fishing game? The fish get creepier the further down you reel them from, which seems very appropriate.