Mola fish, also known as Mola Fish, is a large fish widely distributed in the world's tropical and temperate oceans, the largest known Silas is 3.3 meters long and weighs 2.3 tons.
Moreover, tuna swim very fast, their average speed can reach 60 kilometers per hour, and the fastest instantaneous speed can reach 160 kilometers per hour, so it is relatively difficult to catch. However, sunfish are different, they will not run away even if they are eaten by natural enemies, and it is easier to catch, so why do few people eat sunfish? Let's find out together.
About sunfish
Mola is a more peculiar fish, they have a large, flat body, like to lie flat on the surface of the sea, and look like a car has overturned from a distance, hence its name.
In addition to the sunfish, it also has a number of common names, such as millstone fish, moon fish, sun fish, of which millfish is because they lie flat on the surface of the sea, the skin is rough and gray is somewhat similar to our common millstone, and the moonfish is because they like to forage on the surface of the sea, and the food is mainly jellyfish and zooplankton, at night these prey will shine, so from a distance, the sunfish looks like the moon surrounded by stars.
As for the name of the sunfish, because the sunfish are large fish, they are like other fish, they cannot regulate their body temperature, so, during the day, they like to float on the surface of the sea to bask in the sun, and at the same time floating on the sea has another advantage, that is, to clean up their own parasites.
Because of its slower speed, the sunfish is a parasitic host for more than 40 species of parasites, most of which float on the surface of the sea, which helps seabirds help clean up the parasites on the body.
In a broad sense, the sunfish is a collective name for all fish in the family Cyprinidae, including three genera: Pulva, Speartail and Jackfish, and Hoodwinker sunfish, in which there are only 5 species of animals, of which there is one species in the genus Speartail and one species in the genus Jackwinker and Jackwinker sunfish.
Among the five species of sunfish, the spotted long sunfish is the smallest, the longest body length is about 1 meter, and the other four sunfish are larger, with an average body length of about 2 meters, a body width of about 2.5 meters (including the length of the dorsal fin and fin), and an average weight of about 600 kg.
Spotted long sunfish
The mouth of the sunfish is more interesting, it always looks like a grinning tooth, because the teeth of the sunfish are highly fused into the shape of a bird's beak, which makes them unable to close their mouths, only half open, and because the fins of the sunfish are also highly alienated, which leads to them only having fins on the upper and lower sides of the tail, and they also swim like rowing boats by swinging these two fins.
A sunfish that is gnawed and does not know how to escape?
On the Internet, there are many articles about the sunfish, all describing it as a stupid, very slow moving, even gnawed by natural enemies and does not run away, so is this a misunderstanding or real?
First of all, as a large fish, and the combat effectiveness is also very weak, there will inevitably be large marine predators targeting them, such as large sharks, killer whales and sea lions, which are the three natural enemies of the sunfish.
Secondly, the sunfish encounters these natural enemies is not even able to escape, but can not escape, because the sunfish such a large body only has two slender fins, plus they do not have swim bladders, which leads to their swimming speed is only 2-3 kilometers per hour, and among its three natural enemies, even the slower swimming sea lions have a speed of 30 kilometers per hour, so the sunfish can't run when it encounters natural enemies, not stupid enough not to run.
How did the sunfish, which has almost zero ability to escape, survive to this day?
It is indeed a miracle that a large fish with extremely poor self-preservation ability can survive to this day, after all, there are too many large predators in the ocean. However, the sunfish can survive to this day, and there must be a way to survive with a large population.
First of all, the sunfish is the strongest existing vertebrates, in vertebrates, the reproductive ability of fish is relatively strong, most fish absolute egg carrying from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, under normal circumstances, with hundreds of thousands of absolute eggs of fish is already considered "high yield", but the reproductive ability of sunfish is stronger, their absolute egg capacity can reach 300 million, that is to say, the sunfish can lay 300 million eggs at a time.
With such a high production capacity, even if there is a large loss of eggs and juveniles, the number of sunfish that can grow successfully is a huge number, so being able to live is one of the main reasons for their survival to this day.
Secondly, although the swimming ability of the sunfish is very poor, but their diving ability is not weak, the sunfish can dive to a depth of 800 meters in the ocean layer, which actually avoids the main activity depth of most predators, and the sunfish in addition to the sun is basically within the depth of 100-600 meters vertical up and down activities, this habit also helps them avoid the search of many predators.
Molas are big and easy to catch, why do so few people eat them?
Dumplings are a large fish that are often caught in spiny net fishing (a way of fishing with a large vertical net dragged by a boat), because spiny nets usually catch fish at depths of 0-200 meters, and sunfish like to move at this depth, coupled with their slow movement and poor ability to struggle, so once they encounter a spiny net, they basically do not run.
According to statistics from the National Marine Fisheries Association, from 1990 to 1998, 26.1% of drift-net fish were caught by sunfish, with a total catch of more than 26,000. However, catching large sunfish did not make fishermen happy, but made them very distressed, because almost no one pays for sunfish, so about 42.1% of sunfish are discarded after catch.
Swingfish account for 93% of drift-net catches in Spain (in 1993, the average was more than 70% in other years), and these sunfish are usually pulled up and discarded.
It can be seen that sunfish is very good to catch, and the number is also very large, but in the world, except for a few people in Japan, mainland Taiwan and North Korea and other countries and regions will eat, others usually sneer at sunfish, why is this? There are two main reasons:
First: not delicious. A kind of fish is large, and easy to catch, but not accepted, must be not delicious, the sunfish is like this, it can be described as thick skin, bones and hard, a sunfish after processing, the real edible part does not exceed 10% of the body weight, and the meat quality is very tough, the author was fortunate to eat once, it felt like chewing eraser.
It is precisely because of this taste that most people do not have any appetite for sunfish.
Second: there may be security risks. According to the food analysis of the sunfish, there may be toxicity in its internal organs, such as the speartail sunfish, some scholars believe that it should contain dodder (palytoxin), and all sunfish eat jellyfish, and jellyfish have jellyfish toxins, and some sunfish will also eat tetradentated fish that contain tetrodotoxin itself, so some scholars believe that sunfish may have residual toxins and are not recommended to eat.
At last
Molas are actually not stupid, they know how to stay at the same sea depth as little as possible to avoid the predators as much as possible, and their skin is thick and the taste is extremely poor and dissuades many predators, but its swimming speed does not dare to compliment, can be called the ocean "sloth", so when encountering natural enemies, they cannot escape at all.
As for why humans rarely eat sunfish, the main reason is that it is not delicious, otherwise it would not be the most discarded fish in drift-net fishing.
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