It starts life as a spiky ball two and a half millimeters across, and it can finish at three and a half meters.
That is the largest size increase of any vertebrate: roughly sixty million times its weight at hatching. A newly hatched sunfish is a transparent pufferfish-like larva covered in long spines, drifting in the plankton and eaten by almost everything, and the species compensates the only way it can. A large female carries an estimated three hundred million eggs, more than any other known vertebrate, and releases them into open water where the odds against any individual egg are correspondingly enormous.
So the family runs the opposite strategy to almost everything else on these pages. Where a jawfish guards a few hundred eggs in its mouth and a dottyback fans a ball of them in a hole, a sunfish buys the same result with numbers on a scale that is hard to hold in the head.
This species is told from the other molas by the rear edge: instead of ending flat, it carries a pointed projection in the middle, which is what the name refers to. Like its relatives it eats gelatinous plankton in open water and comes to the surface between deep dives.
The genus. Masturus Gill 1884 - mast- (mastoid) + oura (tail). ETYFish
The species. Masturus lanceolatus (Liénard 1840) - lanceolate. ETYFish
- pointed projection in the middle of the rear edge, unlike the flat end of a mola
- body a tall oval, flattened side to side
- dorsal and anal fins beating together, no true tail
- up to 3.4 m
