Seeing one oarfish is a once-in-a-lifetime event, but seeing two? That’s impossible. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
When two sisters were walking on the beach in Cabo, they ran into something unexpected. A pair of oarfish were struggling in the shallows, and most people will go their entire lives without seeing one, let alone two of the rare and mysterious creatures.
“I didn’t believe my eyes,” she told We Love Animals. “It was like something out of a fiction movie. I was like, ‘is this real!?’ And honestly, when I saw the second one, I got a little nervous.”
Oarfish, which you may have heard of here, here, and maybe here, are sometimes known as the “doomsday fish.” That’s because they are thought to be — by the superstitious, at least — a harbinger of disaster.
“They wash up on the beach before or after a major earthquake or tsunami,” Ben Frable, with Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told CBS8 in San Diego, “and this has been for centuries in Japanese mythology and folklore.”
Oarfish aren’t generally seen in the shallows. They spend most of their lives in the mesopelagic zone at depths of 650 to 3,300 feet, and it’s thought that when they end up on a beach or in the shallows, they are likely sick, dying, or very confused. Most of the time, they aren’t found alive, so spotting two just feet away from each other, thrashing in the sand is rare, to say the least.
Instead of just sitting and gawking, one of the sisters leapt into action. “My sister, she just cannot stand to see anything in pain,” said Monica Pittenger on Instagram, who was filming the whole thing. “She reacted super fast.”
Incredibly, with the help of some other bystanders, both of the stranded fish were pushed back into the sea, where they quickly disappeared from view. Hopefully they returned to the depths from whence they came, but the people on the beach that day were treated to a once-in-a-lifetime experience they won’t ever forget.
