Unfortunate media trend to make oarfish the doomsday fish

Published 16-Aug-2024
Updated 20-Nov-2024

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.

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.

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 this latest specimen included mention of the oarfish as a “harbinger of doom” or “doomsday” fish in almost all the 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:

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.

When a relatively small 4.4 magnitude earthquake happened on Monday, 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.

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:

Update November 2024: Poor oarfish. They are having a bad time of it this summer and fall in California. After the August find noted above, 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.

All of this is no excuse for the media to dumb-down and exaggerate the facts of the finds. The media, however, will not heed any caution about accuracy and reasonableness. The best you can do is learn to reject it and steer clear of clickbait news.