This is the heaviest bony fish in the world. The record individual weighed two thousand seven hundred and forty-four kilograms, about the same as a large car, and it was this species rather than the common mola that turned out to hold the title once the two were properly separated in 2017.
Everything about the body is unusual. There is no tail: the rear of the fish ends in a stiff rudder-like structure formed from the back ends of the dorsal and anal fin rays, and propulsion comes from those two fins beating together like wings. The skeleton is largely cartilage, the skin is several centimeters of tough collagen, and adults carry a bump on the forehead and another on the chin.
It eats gelatinous plankton, mostly salps and jellyfish, which is thin food, and it covers a lot of water and a lot of depth to get enough, diving to several hundred meters and returning to the surface to warm up.
Here it is a genuine rarity. The first photograph of this species in the 🌊 Red Sea was taken in 2004 at Small Brother, which for an animal three meters across says something about how much open water goes unwatched.
The species. Mola alexandrini (Ranzani 1839) - Honours Antonio Alessandrini. ETYFish
- enormous disc of a body ending abruptly, with no true tail
- bump on the forehead and a bulge on the chin in adults
- dorsal and anal fins long and paddle-like, sculled together
- up to 3.3 m and over two tonnes
