Mola Mola - Ocean Sunfish
Ocean sunfish are gentle, slow-moving giants residing in tropical or temperate oceans all over the world. There are four different species of ocean sunfish: common sunfish, Southern Ocean sunfish, slender sunfish and sharptail sunfish.
Ocean sunfish, or mola, look like the invention of a mad scientist. Huge and flat, these silvery-gray fish have tiny mouths and big eyes that vanish into an even bigger body with a truncated tail. Aside from calling them ocean sunfish, we also nickname them moonfish and headfish. Occasionally, you may hear people referring to ocean sunfish as mola. Mola is abbreviated from “Mola Mola” and Mola Mola is really the scientific name for common sunfish. The Mola Mola has been seen in Crystal Bay, at Nusa Penida, on the “otherside” of Q-Dive Bali. The ocean sunfish (Mola mola) is the world’s largest known bony fish, sharks and rays are cartilaginous, not bony. They can weigh about 3000 lb. and some individuals reaching 11 ft. (3 m.) The ocean sunfish (Mola mola) is the world’s largest known bony fish (sharks and rays are cartilaginous, not bony).
Big Sunfish
Ocean sunfish have round, flattened bodies in white or dark gray. Their dorsal and anal fins are extremely long. When ocean sunfish swim, they wave their dorsal and anal fins from side to side in unison. At times, ocean sunfish prefer not to swim and let the current carry them around. Every now and then, ocean sunfish like to float on one side near the ocean surface. Scientists speculate that ocean sunfish carry out this strange behavior to warm up their bodies. Interestingly, like sharks, ocean sunfish expose part of their dorsal fins as they swim. Hence, looking from afar, beach goers cannot really tell if they are staring at hungry sharks or mild-tempered ocean sunfish! Well, just to be careful, getting out of the water is always a good idea!
Molas hatch from tiny eggs but grow to weigh more than a pickup truck, increasing in size 60 million times along the way. That’s the equivalent of a 1-gram tadpole turning into a 60-ton frog! They grow to a maximum of about 10 feet long and are often taller than they are long, up to 14 feet from dorsal fin tip to anal fin tip. They have a truncated tail fin referred to as a clavus—a scalloped fringe of muscle along their blunt rear end, which they use as a rudder.
Inside a mola’s tiny mouth are two pairs of hard teeth plates shaped with a slightly curved ridge that look kind of like a bird’s beak. Molas eat mainly jellies, from big moon jellies to tiny comb jellies.
To break their dinner into manageable pieces they don’t chew; they suck the jellies in and out of their mouths until they’re reduced to gelatinous chunks. We think that molas can enjoy this potentially painful diet because of a mucus-like lining in the digestive tract that keeps them from getting stung. Molas also sometimes eat squid, fish, crustaceans, sponges, brittle stars, and odd seafloor creatures called crinoids.
Sunfish
Molas are slow and deliberate swimmers. Adult molas lack a gas-filled swim bladder, the organ that gives most bony fish exquisite control over buoyancy. Scientists impressed by their slow-motion swimming at first guessed that molas must drift wherever ocean currents take them. But molas in Southern California have been tracked swimming 26 km in a day, at a top speed of 3.2 km per hour—which, to give them credit, is not far off the speed of a yellowfin tuna when it’s just out cruising. Maybe because molas swim so slowly, they tend to be covered in parasites. Nearly 40 different kinds have been recorded, including a few gooseneck barnacles that were discovered living in a mola’s throat. (Some of the parasites that live on molas even carry their own parasites.)
The largest mola ever recorded was 2235 kg (4,927 lbs). It measured 3.1 m (10 ft) from tip to “tail” fin and 4.26 m (14 ft) from dorsal fin to anal fin tip. This animal was a Mola mola and was struck by a boat off Sydney, New South Wales, Australia in September, 1908 (Carwardine, 1995). No data exist on how fast mola grow in the wild but one individual in captivity at the Monterey Bay Aquarium gained 364 kg (800 lbs) in 14 months. Fattened up on a diet of squid, fish and prawns, this fish had to be airlifted out by helicopter and released into the bay after outgrowing its tank. Their population is considered stable, though they frequently get snagged in drift gill nets and can suffocate on sea trash, like plastic bags, which resemble jellyfish.
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