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| Mola mola (Linnaeus, 1758) |
Meet the mighty Mola mola — the ocean’s giant floating dinner plate with the personality of an overgrown puppy and the body plan of a fish someone clearly stopped designing halfway through.
This massive, docile sunfish is one of the two heaviest bony fish alive today, rivalled only by its equally peculiar cousin, the southern sunfish.
Imagine a Volkswagen Beetle crossed with a pizza crust and you are delightfully close to the truth.
The Molidae family first flapped onto the evolutionary scene between 45 and 35 million years ago — long after the dinosaurs had shuffled off this mortal coil and back when whales still sported legs and looked suspiciously like wolves testing out a new aquatic lifestyle.
Their ancestors were adorable pufferfish-like oddballs, chunky little reef dwellers built like armoured dumplings.
Those early pioneers eventually gave rise to Mola around 23 to 20.4 million years ago. Their cousins, the wonderfully bizarre Ranzania, appeared a bit later, around 16 to 13.8 million years ago.
A third modern genus, Masturus, remains frustratingly absent from the fossil record.
Somewhere out there, hidden in ancient sediments, is the fossil equivalent of a missing puzzle piece waiting for some lucky fossil hunter to stumble upon.
Now here is where things get wonderfully absurd. Baby mola are tiny. Ridiculously tiny. Dozens of newborns could fit in the palm of your hand, each scarcely larger than a pea and looking more like nervous confetti than future leviathans.
As youngsters, they are intensely curious and occasionally swim up to humans for a wee investigative nibble. My own mother was sampled by one as a girl while travelling. One tiny tooth embedded itself in her leg and worked its way out weeks later like the world’s most polite shark attack. She still tells the story fondly, which says a great deal about both her and the fish.
As adults, however, mola abandon all restraint and become absolute units. Most tip the scales at 247 to 1,000 kilograms — roughly one-and-a-half cows or one very surprised grizzly bear. The heavyweight champion so far is a bump-head sunfish, Mola alexandrini, caught off Japan in 1996.
That magnificent beast weighed an astonishing 2,300 kilograms (5,070 pounds) and stretched nearly 2.72 metres long. That is less “fish” and more “sentient manhole cover with fins.”
Their sheer bulk and thick hide discourage many predators, though younger fish are still vulnerable to bluefin tuna and mahi-mahi. Adults, meanwhile, occasionally end up on the menu for orca, sharks, sea lions, and sadly, humans. In parts of Japan, Korea and Taiwan they have historically been eaten, though thankfully the European Union has banned the sale of mola species from the family Molidae.
And then there are the names. Oh, the names. No fish on Earth seems to have inspired quite so much international confusion.
The scientific name mola comes from the Latin for “millstone,” which is honestly fair. They do look like giant grinding stones with fins glued on as an afterthought.
Their English name, sunfish, comes from their habit of basking at the surface like retirees on holiday in Palm Springs. Across Europe, many names translate loosely to moonfish — the Dutch maanvis, Portuguese peixe lua, French poisson lune, Spanish pez luna, Italian pesce luna and many others — all nodding to that glorious moon-shaped silhouette.
The Germans, never ones to sugarcoat things, also call it Schwimmender Kopf — “swimming head.” Accurate. Slightly rude, but accurate. The Polish samogłów means “head alone,” which again feels unnecessarily personal.
Scandinavian languages gift us klumpfisk or “lump fish,” while the Finnish möhkäkala roughly translates to “chunky blob fish,” which sounds less like a species name and more like playground bullying. I am Norwegian on my Mother's side and am going to have to fail my relations on their truly uninspired use of names here.
The Chinese name, fān chē yú 翻車魚, means “toppled wheel fish,” which may be my favourite of all. Somewhere, someone looked at a mola and thought, “Ah yes. An overturned wagon wheel with opinions.”
By any name, these gentle giants continue to drift through tropical and temperate seas around the world, basking in the sunlight, nibbling jellyfish, and confusing humanity with their glorious evolutionary weirdness
