Unfortunate media trend to make oarfish the doomsday fish

Published 16-Aug-2024
Updated 20-Nov-2024, 8-Dec-2024, 19-Feb-2025

Two interesting things happened within days of each other. If you have specific information associated with these two things that overlap, you are prone to see a relationship between them, even if there is no real association. This happens all the time. For example: your knee hurts on Saturday and it rains on Sunday. If you have heard that a change in weather, such as a change in barometric pressure causes joint pain to be more noticeable, you might conclude that the weather caused your knee to hurt, and not remember that you strained it on Friday doing something mundane.

And so it goes with earthquake precursors. As much as I would like to believe that there are natural precursors that signal an earthquake is forthcoming, the evidence is not useful. The various related events shouldn’t be entirely discounted, but it’s not a simple linear association or a reliable association.

Starting in the summer of 2024, and continuing with multiple events, oarfish have been encountered along the California coast. The latest event occurred in February 2025 at Playa El Quemado in the Gulf of California.

Oarfish and earthquakes

Japanese mythology has several animal-related stories about earthquakes including one that says finding the oarfish means an earthquake is coming. So, the finding of specimens now almost always includes mention of the oarfish as a “harbinger of doom” or “doomsday” fish in news headlines. This is unfortunate and very annoying because there is actually no validity to this claim. In 2019, a statistical study of Japanese accounts showed the evidence for the correlation is not there. It also doesn’t make much sense. The scientifical reasoning is that electromagnetic effects from a stress buildup prior to an earthquake will stun and disable the deep sea fish, which then floats to the surface and dies. Here are some arguments against that idea:

Oarfish are often called “sea-serpents”, another unfortunate misnomer since they are fish, not snakes and don’t match well with most historical accounts of humped “sea serpent” sightings. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish. However, once the media latches onto such simplistic clickbait nonsense, they repeat it ad nauseum.

Oarfish filmed in Mexico in 2014:

1. There is no indication that EMF fields are released during offshore earthquakes. It may happen in some instances but this has no connection to land-based fault movement. If this did happen, there would likely be other indicators, including recorded and dated observations, and other animal reactions.
2. It’s more likely that an underwater earthquake itself would cause animal disturbance if it was large enough. The movement can cause sediment clouds and sudden water disruption. Undersea earthquakes are particularly devastating for coral and other benthic organisms that can be shaken loose from their environments or buried in underwater slides.
3. In areas around the Pacific rim, earthquakes are very common, so it’s not difficult to correlate the rare fish find to any particular event. When there are no magnitude or time limits to the association, it’s easy to make a correlation.

La Jolla Cove, August 2024

On Saturday, August 10, a group of swimmers in La Jolla Cove, off San Diego, California, found a dead floating oarfish. The huge, silver, vertically flattened, ribbon-like fish measured 12 feet long and is known as the Pacific, or Giant Oarfish, Regalecus glesne. It’s amazing to look at and rare to find. The crew of friends knew this and hauled the beast onto a board and road it to shore, contacting Scripps Institution of Oceanography to collect it.

When a relatively small 4.4 magnitude earthquake happened on August 12 near Los Angeles, some connected the event with the oarfish find. Note that this was not a deep sea quake – it was land based with San Diego being about 125 miles away from it. There was no correlation between the two events.

There are no offshore earthquake-producing faults off the San Diego coast so the typical reasoning for the fish death due to a coming earthquake doesn’t apply unless it floated from Northern California waters. But, now we are really straining the limits of the myth.

September and November, 2024

Poor oarfish. They were having a bad time of it in summer and fall in California. After the August find, a partial specimen was found in September at Huntington Beach. And in early November, a third specimen, a 9½-foot-long carcass was found on Grandview Beach in Encinitas, discovered by Alison Laferriere, a Ph.D. candidate at La Jolla’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Samples were saved for study. According to The Guardian, Scripps had been notified of the September specimen, which was too degraded to save.

The news of three oarfish in 3 months was too much for news sources to handle and they began wildly casting out “Doomsday fish” headlines once again. At first, the correlation was to the shallow earthquake that occurred. But there was no actual relationship. The three sightings are strange because oarfish are rarely seen. However, several things are going on here that have nothing to do with a coming earthquake, even though the media can’t help but cater to sensationalism. First, the fish are quite possibly affected by changing ocean conditions and/or the red tide that kills fish via a toxin. Secondly, people are now more aware of the animal and likely to report it. Now, with social media, their findings are shared worldwide. So, yes, there may be more oarfish mortality and yes, we are certainly going to know about it.

The media will sensationalize every find and not heed any caution about accuracy and reasonableness.

The December quake

After the large earthquake that occurred offshore on about 62 miles west of Ferndale, California that caused a tsunami alert on December 5, 2024, once again, a few people remembered the oarfish. It’s common to hear about events and relate them in time while also telescoping the time and distance. When we recognize that this is done, the oarfish bear no correlation to the quakes in California. So, here’s a close up map of the three approximate locations of the oarfish finds in October and November in relation to the land-based 4.4 magnitude earthquake near Los Angeles.

Here is the same map from above that includes the larger quake at the plate triple-junction much farther north.

The distance here is about 600 miles from and 2 months later than the southern California fish finds. There is no mechanism to connect the land based quake or the underwater quake to the oarfish finds. If there was a connection to quakes, we would expect to see more than one oarfish encountered by fishing boats or washed onshore nearer to the northern quake. However, there is also no connection we can currently make between the plate movements here and anything that would affect the fish in particular.

California has A LOT of seismic activity. It’s unreasonable to make an oarfish connection to anything besides, possibly, the real-time specific ocean-climate situation.

Gulf of California, February 2025

A much smaller and live oarfish was spotted by swimmers on a beach in Playa El Quemado, in the Gulf of California in mid February. The animal was alive and swimming in the shallows but beached itself several times. The images taken show the fish did not look injured. But it was also relatively small, maybe only 3-4 feet long. Oarfish have been found living in this gulf. Five healthy specimens of Regalecus glesne were spotted by a remote research vehicle between 2008 and 2011. So, this particular event does not seem ominous. But neither did the rest. The Gulf was created by tectonic movement and is continuing to widen; it’s where the San Andreas fault changes to a series of complex transform faults.

But, again, these waters are conducive to wildlife as well as having a geologically active seafloor. And ocean life will occasionally be seen on the beaches. There is no reason to consider this to be a sign of anything.

I’m going to keep this post open for further updates.