Rare sea creature washes ashore in Southern California
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) — A 7-foot (215-centimeter) sea creature that washed ashore in Southern California has been identified as a hoodwinker sunfish, a recently identified rare species thought to live in the Southern Hemisphere.
The University of California, Santa Barbara, said an intern spotted the stranded fish last week at Sands Beach in the university’s Coal Oil Point Natural Reserve.
The intern alerted Jessica Nielsen, a conservation specialist at Coal Oil Point who initially thought it was a type of local sunfish and posted photos to the reserve’s Facebook page.
That drew the attention of Thomas Turner, an associate professor in UCSB’s ecology, evolution and marine biology department who examined the fish and posted photos to the iNaturalist online community.
That caught the eye of Marianne Nyegaard of Murdoch University in Australia, who identified the species in 2017 and formally named it Mola tecta but gave it the hoodwinker moniker because it had somehow escaped scientific recognition.