Elusive oarfish found at Ocean Beach on Tasmania's rugged west coast

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

When Sybil Robertson went dog walking on Tasmania's Ocean Beach on Monday, she was unaware she was about to join the small club of people who have found an elusive oarfish.
The creature from the deep is the longest bony fish species in the world and is rarely seen by humans.
Known by some as the "doomsday fish", it is linked to tales of sea serpents and natural disasters.
"I was watching a sea eagle flying around and I noticed it was coming down onto the beach and I thought, 'That's unusual, I don't often see them land on the beach,'" Ms Robertson said.
The Strahan resident could see the sun catching a silvery streak on the beach, on state's rugged west coast.
"I could see it was a long fish but I had no idea what kind of fish," Ms Robertson said.
"As I got closer I could see the beautiful colouring around its heads and the markings on it were fabulous."
She said it was a "good three paces" in length and had some injuries, but otherwise appeared in good condition.
Ms Robertson took photos of the fish and posted them to a social media group called Citizen Scientists of Tasmania, where it was confirmed as an oarfish.
In a race against time due to hungry birds circling, authorities were contacted to take samples of the fish so it could be researched by CSIRO experts.
Ocean Beach is known for its wildness, and at its longitude there is no land between it and South America.
"It's a good place to be."
Neville Barrett, a fish biologist and associate professor with the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, described the oarfish Ms Robertson found as a "beauty".
"It's a very rare occasion when one washes ashore," he said.
"There's not many reportings at all."
Dr Barrett said the fish could grow up to 8 metres, and lived in the open ocean at depths from 150m to 1 kilometre below the surface.
He said very few people had seen one alive.
"It's very much a fortuitous, lucky thing really," Dr Barrett said.
"It's not the kind of thing that would be caught in trawlers and it's not somewhere we go diving — we're not catching them."
He said most sank when they died, and decomposed.
"Occasionally when they are sick, apparently, they swim up to the surface for unknown reasons," Dr Barrett said.
"There's a lot of them out there in the ocean almost certainly, but they live and die well out of sight of the average human.
There were two species of oarfish found in Australia, according to CSIRO ichthyologist John Pogonoski.
One has dozens of records in Southern Australia and the other, a tropical species, has only a handful of sightings.
"They are impressive," Mr Pogonoski said.
He said there were iconic photos from history of about 10 to 15 people holding up a dead oarfish, including one found in California in 2013.
"In Australia we know of at least 70 records in scientific databases of specimens that have washed up," he said.
Mr Pogonoski said the CSIRO had an oarfish in its collection that washed up under the Tasman Bridge in Hobart more than a decade ago.
Given its sea serpent-like features, he said he could see why it was the subject of myths.
Dr Barrett said the body fish was "gelatinous" and it fed on crustaceans.
"They aren't top predators, they don't swim fast," he said.
And not much is known about how long they live for.
"Something that [oarfish] gets up to 8m in length — it'd be at least 20 to 30 years to get to that length," Dr Barrett said.
"Most deep-water species are very old — orange roughy [fish] for example can get to 120 years."
The oarfish is associated with natural disasters and bad news, and the myth was revived when many of them were seen before the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
Dr Barrett said there was no evidence the fish could sense a natural disaster.
"It's just a random event, there's no real evidence there's any linkage," he said.
"I can imagine a significant earthquake could disturb mid-water fish and stun them and lead to some coming up, but that's at the same time [as the diaster].