Animal · United States, Mexico, Japan
Giant oarfish
Regalecus glesne — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The giant oarfish is the longest bony fish in the sea, a silver ribbon with a red crest that can grow to eight metres. It lives deep in the open ocean and is almost never seen alive.
Picture credit: Parker & Coward (Public domain) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the giant oarfish live?
Home: Open ocean, from near the surface down to 500 m.
In the wild it lives in these countries: the United States, Mexico, Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: usually about 3 m long, up to 8 m in rare cases. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
An oarfish has no scales and no teeth. Its body is a flat silver band, edged along the whole back by a red fin whose first rays stand up over the head like a crown. Divers who have filmed one found it hanging in the water head up, tail down, pushing itself along with a wave running through that long fin while the rest of the body stays still. It eats krill and other small drifting animals, sucking them in with a mouth that folds forward like a tube. Almost everything known about the fish comes from dead ones washed up on beaches, which is why stories grew around it: in Japan it is called the messenger from the sea god's palace, and people once believed its appearance warned of an earthquake. Scientists have compared strandings and quakes and found no connection.
Find it on the globe
Giant oarfish is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How long can an oarfish get?
Most are about three metres long. Measured specimens have reached seven to eight metres, which makes the oarfish the longest bony fish known; longer claims of eleven metres have never been confirmed.
Do oarfish warn of earthquakes?
No. The idea comes from Japanese tradition, where the fish is a messenger from the sea god. Researchers compared decades of strandings with earthquake records and found no link between the two.
Why do people so rarely see an oarfish?
Because it lives far from land in deep open water, where almost nobody looks. The ones people do see are usually sick or dying animals that drift into shallow water or wash up on a beach.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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