School of Sunfish

By Kevin Zelnio, on February 22nd, 2011 4 comments   Fish   mola-mola, Sunfish  

Hat tip to Chris M. for this find from Neptune Canada’s YouTube Channel.

4 comments to School of Sunfish

• Al Dove

  February 23, 2011 at 07:40 · Reply

  I LOVE how you can see the egg strands of parasitic penellid copepods streaming off the trailing edge. The disc-like eggs form long strings like a stack of casino chips, but the adult copepods are anchored in the flesh. At up to a foot in length, they’re orders of magnitude larger than their free-living relatives and totally unrecognisable. There’s a great sequence in Blue Planet where floating sea gulls peck at penellids on a basking sunfish

• Priscilla W

  February 23, 2011 at 08:32 · Reply

  What awesome video footage! Thanks for sharing. Also, thanks to Al for the info on the egg strands!

• Chuck

  February 23, 2011 at 10:14 · Reply

  Those things can really motor. I never realized sunfish were so agile in the water.

• Al Dove

  February 24, 2011 at 10:40 · Reply

  I think the little ones like those are pretty agile, but the bigger they get the more they lumber along. They’re really smart too, and very amenable to training in an aquarium setting. They struggle a little bit with understanding walls, though, as do many species that spend their entire life cycle in the pelagic zone.