See a Deep-Sea Oarfish Caught Alive on Video in a Rare Encounter on a Beach in Mexico
In Japanese folklore, appearances of these elusive marine creatures dubbed ‘doomsday fish’ are believed to foreshadow earthquakes, though scientists found no strong relationship between these events in a recent study
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While walking on the beach in Baja California Sur, Mexico, Idaho resident Robert Hayes and his wife spotted something strange in the water. He thought it might be a small alligator, while his wife wondered if it was a shark, per the Washington Post’s Kim Bellware.
As it turns out, they were both wildly wrong. The creature lying on the sand was an oarfish: an eel-shaped deep-sea marine creature also known as the “doomsday fish” in Japanese folklore. While these fish are known to occasionally wash up dead on beaches, live oarfish sightings are extremely rare—the first known video of one was captured by the U.S. Navy in 2001, per the Florida Museum of Natural History.
This time, “the fish swam straight at us, lifting its head above the water about two inches,” Hayes tells Storyful. “We redirected it three times out to the water, but it came back each time.” The video, taken February 9, shows the oarfish beached on the sand and a man attempting to guide the creature back into the water.
“This is amazing. This is the smallest one I’ve ever seen,” the man says in the video. In fact, oarfish can grow up to 36 feet long and weigh hundreds of pounds. The creatures usually live around 650 feet below the surface of the ocean, but they have been found at depths of up to 3,280 feet, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Despite the oarfish’s elusiveness, Southern California saw a surprising amount of them in 2024. One notable recent appearance of the species was last August, when a group of kayakers and snorkelers found the body of a 12-foot-long specimen in California’s La Jolla Cove. That marked only the 20th known oarfish to have washed up in the state since 1901, per the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
“People have studied them, but we’ve very rarely interacted with them alive in their natural habitat,” Ben Frable, who manages the Scripps Institution marine vertebrate collection, told the Los Angeles Times’ Grace Toohey back in August. That discovery was followed by two other dead specimens that washed ashore that same year: one in September in Orange County and another in November some 25 miles north of San Diego, as Frable tells USA Today’s Anthony Robledo and Amaris Encinas.
According to Japanese legend dating back to the 17th century, seeing an oarfish in shallow water is a harbinger of doom, specifically earthquakes. This superstition was bolstered when 20 oarfish washed ashore along the Japanese coast shortly before the nation’s infamous magnitude 9.0 earthquake in 2011, which was followed by a devastating tsunami and nuclear accident.
More recently, the U.S. West Coast was struck by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake just about a month after the November oarfish sighting. These coincidences have clearly made a lasting impression, since researchers felt compelled to officially myth-bust the association between oarfish and earthquakes in a 2019 study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
In reality, “if one is spotted close to the surface, it typically indicates that the creature is sick, dying or at least disoriented,” Katie Hogge writes for the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy.
Indeed, Hayes tells the Washington Post that there seemed to be a wound on the oarfish’s face (though it isn’t visible in the video) and that the man who had unsuccessfully tried to guide the creature back into the water said he’d take the oarfish to a marine biologist. On the other hand, Ted Pietsch, a zoologist and biologist specialized in deep-sea fish at the University of Washington, tells the Post that “nobody knows why they do this. It’s same as the mystery of why whales beach themselves.”
While oarfish are not omens of disaster, they clearly continue to intrigue us with their enduring marine secrets.
