It was a beautiful warm day in north-west Tasmania when a fish with a reputation as a harbinger of doom washed ashore.
Tony Cheesman, who lives in the seaside town of Penguin, was walking his two dogs, Ronan and Custard, along the beach at Preservation Bay on Friday morning when something silvery and surrounded by gulls grabbed his attention.
“When I got to it, I saw this massive fish, then I noticed the beautiful colours, and it had these long fans coming out of its chin and the top of its head,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like it.”
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Prof Culum Brown, an expert in fish at Macquarie University, said there were several species of oarfish, but the three-metre specimen found at Penguin was probably the largest and most well-known – the giant oarfish.
“They’re a very unusual looking fish,” he said. “They’re super long and skinny, kind of like a ribbon, and they have a continuous dorsal fin.”
Giant oarfish could grow up to eight or nine metres, he said, but because they lived 200 to 1,500 metres below the surface, they were rarely seen. “They only ever show up at the surface when they’re sick or dying,” he said.
In Japanese folklore, oarfish were known as ryūgū-no-tsukai, which translated to “the sea god’s palace messenger”, Brown said, and their arrival was thought to herald calamity, such as an earthquake or a tsunami.
But they were an unreliable harbinger of doom, according to one study, which found no link between sightings of these slender sea creatures and imminent disaster.
“Oarfish just rock up at random,” Brown said. “We don’t know very much about them. So any specimen that washes up is really valuable.”
Oarfish were also connected to myths about sea serpents, said David Waldron, an associate professor and historian at Federation University.
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“When they come to the surface, which is when sailors in the 19th and 18th century would see them, it would be when they’re ill and thrashing about and not able to maintain their normal depth underwater.”
One Australian newspaper even reported the discovery of “a supposed sea serpent” at Penguin, Tasmania in 1878, with an engraving of the “mystic creature” looking very much like an oarfish.
Enormous, brightly coloured, distinctive, and extremely rare, their legendary appeal was similar to other creatures from the deep – like the giant squid, they were fascinating and mysterious, Waldron said. “It’s a very spectacular looking fish.”
Was this one a harbinger of doom? Cheesman didn’t think so. “It was too nice a day for that.”
