Fun Fact: If a Mola has parasites, it'll swim to the surface and float on its side so passing seabirds can land on it and pick the parasites off of its body.
@thomaz-wh4ox but in the ocean wouldn't that make it more vulnerable to predators? Because alot of predators will see something that looks injured and eat it.
Some researchers think that they lack the ability to feel pain, because they don't freak out and flop around when being attacked and eaten. But maybe its just the lack of the bilateral muscles and slow movement of their rigid body that gives us the impression that they dont feel pain, because they look to be still in a "calm" state? Im sure there's other reasons for their hypothesis, but its still interesting (and kinda sad) to think about....
The most convincing argument I've heard is they don't have the brain power to react quickly, so it's more like 56k modemn - by the time it registers it's done
If they have nerve endings, they feel pain. People just personify everything and if it doesn't look the way they think pain should look, it's not recognized. People also buy 5 gallon tanks for goldfish. We're idiots.
Nature's version of putting a nail in a wall by placing a hammer on the floor, placing the nail on the hammer, ripping the wall off and banging it against the hammer.
it feels like looking at those inbred dog breeds that are just born to suffer. but like, it somehow evolved to be this fucked up looking all on its own
I don't care what anyone says about the sun fish I think it's a cool looking creature and people forget that life always tries different things to create diversity.
It doesn't try, because it's not an agent. Variations happen in creatures by some causes, some survive, some die off. Like how parents look certain way, children look, are a bit different, extend that to millions of generations.
The lack of scales also makes it extremely prone to parasites and im pretty sure its just a free buffet for a motivated predator. How has this thing not gone extinct?
They fly sideways through the water If attacked, they simply accept their fate They like to stay in the shallows but can dive unfathomably deep if they must Sunfish are fantastically unusual
My grandfather who was an old tuna fisherman back in the 60s told my dad, who then told me about a time when he was trolling just outside our local harbor and he snagged a sunfish(mola mola). Took him 5 minutes to realize what was going on and start moving the boat towards the fish to unhook it. When he got a few feet away from it launched out of the water 6-8ft with a giant shark bite out of the underside of it. My grandpa cut his line instantly and ran back into the harbor
You want to really freak out... search videos of this thing being caught and cleaned... the entire fish is mostly collagen! And the tendons that reach through the body will really send you into orbit when you see them!!
Plenty of animals have really short mating windows are do shitty in captivity. Pandas in the wild do just fine. Or DID just fine. Tearing up their forests dont help.
@@puffinjuice clearly it did _something_ right with those fish, or they wouldn't still be around and breeding. Remember, any extant animal, no matter how stupid it seems, somehow prevails in the giant deathmatch that is the food chain, and they've lasted this long even with humans around.
@@Pooreboy1978 evolution occurs when there are mutations. Mutations can be beneficial or detrimental to the survival of animals. Not all mutations are going to lead to death though. This is why i imagine that mistakes are all around us. Sure, as time goes on the biggest mistakes will disappear, but not all creatures have predators. Waiting for biologists to rip my argument apart 😂
Guys, stop trashing this fish for being an “inefficient swimmer” when it literally isn’t- it swims quite fast especially for its size, it used a lift based swim that makes it easy for the mola Mola to travel long distances vertically or horizontally, given that it’s the heaviest bony fish in the world, I think it’s doing pretty well 😂
This is also the only way the Ocean Sunfish has to reach the surface as Sunfish lack a Swim Bladder - a sac found within the bodies of most other fish that is used to control their buoyancy and thus their surface/dive rate. Without a functioning swim bladder, most fish will sink to the ocean floor, helpless and vulnerable to predators and territorial creatures on the seafloor, or if in particularly deep waters, crushed to death via Delta-P in the abyss.
I was gifted on my one trip in Ocean away from coast, dolphin fish fishing... one of these giants came floating by... a whale would've been cool, but this was just unique
