The depths of the sea hold life forms that are truly beautiful, truly weird, truly friendly, and truly deadly.
We have much to learn about the critters of the deep sea.
The surface of the sea has its share of strange creatures, too. As a sea captain, I’ve marveled many times at critters I wasn’t familiar with, and in some cases was pretty sure I didn’t want to become overly familiar with them.
I recall reaching over the side of the boat to pick up a foot-long stick floating at the surface. It looked like a stick and pretty much felt like a wet stick. But as I held it in my hand and looked at it, the critter began writhing and trying to get out of my grasp.
I was plenty willing to help it out by tossing it back in the water. After all, some sea critters teach painful lessons, and I worried that it could bite and have venom.
My vote for the craziest critter at the sea surface is the sunfish (a.k.a. mola mola). It has a weird face for a fish, a large, flat, round body with small fins that look to be overworked when the critter needs to move quickly.
It doesn’t usually have much reason to move quickly since much of its diet consists of jellies (jellyfish), which aren’t exactly known for bursts of blinding speed. I like to think of the sunfish as an oceanic sloth.
The tail of a sunfish isn’t much help in the speed department, considering it pretty much doesn’t have a tail. It kinds looks like it lost its tail in an accident. It sure could use a tail at times, like when it wants to jump up out of the water to take a look-see around.
Watching a sunfish jump is enough to make a person laugh and feel sorry for the critter, all at the same time. The jumping act is just about the last thing this critter was bio-engineered for.
That explains why they don’t get much air and they have a propensity for flopping back into the water in a manner that looks as painful as a person doing a belly-flop from a diving board.
I was really feeling sorry for them one day when cruising off of the west end of Santa Cruz Island. There were about 30 juvenile (smaller than a dinner plate) sunfish all floating in an area and not looking quite right.
Closer inspection showed they were all dead, and I sadly watched the reason.
A pack of sea lions had found the school and were biting just the bellies out of the sunfish, the moving on to the next one to repeat the process. That was a sad moment.
