Photos show strange 3.5-foot-long Opah fish that washed up in a “rare” find on Oregon Beach

An odd-looking 3.5-foot-long fish washed up on an Oregon beach Wednesday – and identified as a rare sighting of an Opah.

The Seaside Aquarium in the town of Seaside said the fish, which weighed 100 pounds, was sighted by a member of the public on Sunset Beach Wednesday morning and reported to its staff at 8:00 a.m.

After seeing photos of the “unusual” fish, the aquarium staff went to the beach to retrieve them. Opah, also called sunfish, is characterized by its flat, gray-silver round bodies, red mouths and fins, and large eyes decorated with gold. There are red scales with white spots near their bellies. The specimen found on Sunset Beach had orange scales that covered most of its body.

“It got quite a buzz in the aquarium where people were encouraged to look at this beautiful and strange looking fish,” the aquarium wrote alongside a photo of the shimmering fish on its Facebook page.

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The Seaside Aquarium said it was “always looking for new educational opportunities,” so a group of students would be invited to dissect the Opah. This is done in collaboration with the Columbia River Maritime Museum. The fish is frozen until the start of the school year.

Lynn Mattes of the Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Marine Resources Program told Newsweek, “Finding an opah on a beach like this is sure to be a rare occurrence.”

Recreational anglers occasionally catch opah while fishing for albacore. If this happens, it will be “big news” in marine fisheries, according to Mattes.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife last took physical samples from an opah in 2015 when three samples were taken, Mattes added.

The aquarium’s Facebook post said it was rare but not unheard of to spot an opah in Oregon, citing a 2009 report of a man who caught 60 kilometers from the Columbia River estuary .

OregonLive wrote at the time that a man named Dave Phillips was looking for tuna when he hooked the 97 pound 4-ounce fish. Phillips ate some of his catch at a Hawaiian restaurant near his home in Vancouver, Washington, and described it as “delicious”.

Keith Chandler, manager of the Seaside Aquarium, told Oregon Coast Beach Connection the Opah was “a pretty cool find for a Wednesday morning.”

Chandler added, “I saw maybe a year ago that we caught this on a fishing boat – a baby.”

Tiffany Boothe of Seaside Aquarium told Oregon Coast Beach Connection, “You come here from time to time during the summer, just like Mola Mola.

“But we rarely see them washed ashore. They follow their food in the warm currents of water off the coast. We really don’t know how many or how often. Fishermen will see them more often than beachgoers.”

According to Mattes, there could be a number of reasons why the fish ended up on the beach. She doubted the Opah was caught and thrown away by anglers because it was a “prized species”.

Mattes said, “What happens to some of the other offshore species we occasionally see on the beach is that the individual may have been sick (e.g. parasites), old, or otherwise ended up in the cooler coastal waters and currents and it just wasn’t you can return to the warmer water that she prefers. Unable to handle the cooler waters, they succumb and end up being washed ashore. “

Anyone who finds an unusual fish or other animal on the beach should take photos from different angles, along with another item to illustrate its size, and note the location, she added.

They should then contact a local aquarium “as they are often excited to see new things and likely welcome the opportunity to have a new educational resource.

“Contacting the local fish and wildlife authority is also helpful as we also like to look out for new / unusual species.”

Stock image of a sunfish eating a jellyfish. An opah washed up in Oregon.
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