The ocean sunfish, mola mola, is one of the strangest things in the seas. It is enormous, the heaviest bony fish in the world at over two metric tons: it has, unusually for a bony fish, a hide that can deflect hand harpoons; and it is weird-looking, like a somewhat flattened blimp with fins. The body seems absurdly short for all its size, as if the Creator got halfway through it and lost interest. (Or, for those old enough to remember, it looks like a subcompact car called the AMC Gremlin.) It roams harmlessly through the oceans, slurping up zooplankton and (alas) plastic bags. A new species, Mola tecta, slightly different and appearance and clearly distinct in DNA, was described in 2017 from specimens in the South Pacific. It was nicknamed the hoodwinker sunfish, in tribute to its hiding for so long in plain sight. What's new is that a specimen of M. tecta washed up on a beach in California, providing the first record of this animal in the Northern Hemisphere. The animal, over 2m long, has garnered media attention across the USA. The hoodwinker's discoverer, Marianne Nyegaard, said of this far-ranging fish, "I couldn't believe it. I nearly fell out of my chair." What no one knows is whether this is a fluke, or there might be a population we don't know about.
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