They Found a Sunfish Too Big for Their Scale

Fish caught in Mediterranean thought to weigh about 4K pounds
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 19, 2021 6:07 PM CDT

It's an almost mind-boggling catch: a sunfish so huge that marine biologist says it couldn't be put on a 1,000-kilogram scale (that's one that can weigh up to 2,204 pounds) for fear of breaking it. The massive sunfish became ensnared in a tuna-fishing boats nets on Oct. 4. Marine biologist Enrique Ostale was called in to evaluate, and tells Reuters the fish found in the Mediterranean off Ceuta measured 10.5 feet long and 9.5 feet wide and was brought aboard using two cranes from different vessels, per USA Today. "Based off its corpulence and compared with other catches, it must've weighed around 2 tonnes," he says. That's roughly 4,400 pounds.

"We couldn't believe our luck," Ostale says in an interview with the Guardian. "We have read books and articles about the dimensions that a sunfish could have, but we didn't know we would be able to watch it and touch it ourselves." The fish was returned to the sea that same day. The waters off Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the north coast of Africa, are about 2,300 feet deep. Field & Stream reports the fish is thought to have been a southern sunfish, which a 2017 study determined is the heaviest species of bony fish on the planet. This one isn't the biggest ever caught though. Per Guinness, that record goes to a 5,070-pounder found off Japan in 1996. (More strange stuff stories.)

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