Dive school identifies Maradhoo’s “strange fish” as Ocean Sunfish

Maldivers, a PADI-certified 5-star dive school in Male, today identified a “strange fish”, which another local daily said had washed up on Maradhoo island in Addu atoll on Sunday, as the Ocean Sunfish, scientific name Mola Mola.

The rare sighting of the fish caught the imagination of Maradhoo residents, and when it died, it was buried in the island under the care of the police and Maldives National Defence Force, the local daily reported.

An official from Maldivers, said that the Sunfish is occasionally spotted in Maldives but that since sightings are rare, elderly people in Maldives called it “Mas-buri”, which in Dhivehi literally translates to “half a fish” due to the fish’s odd appearance.

The website of Britain’s Natural History Museum last year said that the century-old mystery of what comprises the peculiar tail of one of the largest of all bony fishes had been resolved.

“The sunfish's tail evolved, not from an adaptation of the tail or caudal fin, but when the dorsal and anal fins merged,” the website said.

This is what the website had to say on the sunfish:

“Ocean sunfishes belong to the family Molidae and are amongst the largest of all bony fishes, with up to 1.5 tonnes in weight and 3 metres in length. Instead of a tail fin they have a rudder-like structure called the clavus .

Their large size and peculiar appearance has fascinated scientists since they were first illustrated as early as the mid-1500s.

Dr Ralf Britz, fish researcher (ichthyologist) at the Natural History Museum, and his colleague Dr G David Johnson from the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, wanted to find out why the tail was so unlike those of any other fishes.

There are two previous explanations for how the sunfish tail evolved - one was that the tail or caudal fin had been modified through evolution, the other highly unusual possibility was that the tail evolved from the merging of the dorsal and anal fins.

Britz and Johnson studied the tails of the ocean sunfish in detail by looking at the developing skeleton of the young, or larvae, under a microscope.

They compared its development with that of a less modified relative of the sunfish, the puffer fish.

They found no sign of the caudal fin at any stage of the development of the ocean sunfish and discovered that the dorsal and anal fins grow together to form the clavus. In evolutionary terms the dorsal and anal fins have completely replaced the tail fin.

Dr Britz said 'The colossal ocean sunfish, a pelagic fish (living in the open sea) with a wide distribution, has lost its tail fin, the main locomotory structure in all other fishes. This was a very surprising and unexpected result!'

The details of this research were published in the October (2006) issue of the Journal of Morphology.”

Source: Haveeru Online