A mysterious creature has appeared on a popular beach, sparking a divided reaction among locals and shocked visitors.
Beachgoers originally thought it was a large rock when they first spotted the 2.7m-wide sea monster in Petrel Cove near Encounter Bay along South Australia’s southern coast last weekend.
Stunned locals shared photos and videos of the body on social media.
While some were excited to come across the “amazing” discovery, others described it as “sad to see.”
The South Australian Museum has since confirmed that the creature is “almost certainly a lump-headed sunfish”.
The dead sunfish, which is partially buried in the sand, has attracted a steady stream of visitors to the beach, despite its strong smell.
At 2.7m wide, some people first thought the giant sunfish was a large rock.
Local Dani Brown thought the giant sunfish was “pretty cool” and posed next to it to show the scale and size of the creature.
Since then, it has also gone viral online.
‘Wow! The dead sunfish, which is partially buried in the sand, has attracted a steady stream of visitors to the beach, despite its strong smell. sighting,” commented one viewer.
Another added: ‘Unbelievable. I wonder how prolific they are.
A third wrote “Beautiful and gentle creatures.”
Local resident Dani Brown heard about the fish and wanted to see it with her own eyes.
“It was great to see, this is the first time I’ve seen one,” he said. yahoo.
Although sunfish can grow up to 4m across, this 2.7m specimen was still enormous when Ms Brown lay beside it.
A South Australian Museum spokesperson said yahoo That although sunfish are found around the world, the giant species washed ashore is the most common seen in southern Australia.
‘It can be said to be a bump-headed sunfish rather than one of the other two types (Mola tecta, the trickster sunfish and Mola mola, the ocean sunfish) due to the prominent chin that can be seen on the photo. The other two species don’t have that,” she said.
Although it is not known how the sunfish died, Danish marine biologist Marianne Nyegaard previously told Yahoo that it may be impossible to know what kills them and even believes that stranded sunfish sometimes “fall to earth” in the same way as people “fall into the ocean.”
“Branded sunfish typically appear to have been healthy with no obvious cause of death or deterioration to explain why they ended up on the beach,” he said.
The giant sunfish partially embedded in the sand has attracted a constant flow of visitors since Sunday despite its smell.
It is not the first time that a sunfish, which normally lives in the deep ocean, has washed up on the coast of South Australia.
A species of Mola mola is believed to have been found near the mouth of the Murray River in 2019.
Ralph Foster, director of the South Australian Museum’s fish collection, said ABC News At that time, the giant animals loved to come to the surface and sunbathe, hence their name.
Foster said the creatures come to the surface and lie on their sides and, once they warm up enough, return to a depth of several hundred meters and “feed on jellyfish and stay down there.”