A giant oarfish, a mythical creature that is said to herald earthquakes, was spotted by divers off Taiwan with mysterious holes in its body, as shown in a video that has gone viral on Instagram.
The video shows the divers swimming around the shiny silver fish floating near the surface of the water off the coast of Ruifang.
One of the divers even reached out and touched the legendary sea serpent, also known as the “earthquake fish.”
The divers estimated that the oarfish was about 6-and-a-half feet long, which is impressive but not as big as they can get. Oarfish are the longest bony fish in the world, reaching up to 56 feet in length.
Sadly, the oarfish’s appearance in shallow waters may have been a sign of its poor health.
“It must have been dying, so it swam into shallower waters,” said Wang Cheng-Ru, a diving instructor who had never seen an oarfish before in his years of scuba diving.
The fish also had strange circular holes across its body, which experts think were caused by a cookie-cutter shark. This small predator is known for biting out chunks of flesh from large fish, whales, and even nuclear submarines, although the latter may be confusing.
{{/usCountry}}The fish also had strange circular holes across its body, which experts think were caused by a cookie-cutter shark. This small predator is known for biting out chunks of flesh from large fish, whales, and even nuclear submarines, although the latter may be confusing.
{{/usCountry}}The oarfish’s visit to the surface may also have been a bad sign for us, according to some locals who believe that these fish — which live at depths of between 656 and 3,200 feet below the ocean’s surface — are a warning of an upcoming earthquake.
This belief is based on Japanese folklore, which states that the slender fish will deliberately rise to the surface and beach themselves before a big quake.
This fear increased after the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, as dozens of these supposed sea-based seismographs had washed ashore in the two years before the disaster.
However, experts say that there is no scientific evidence of a link between oarfish and earthquakes.
“There is no scientific evidence of a connection, so I don’t think people need to worry,” said Hiroyuki Motomura, a professor of ichthyology at Kagoshima University. “I believe these fish tend to rise to the surface when their physical condition is poor, rising on water currents, which is why they are so often dead when they are found.”