On 16 March 2019 Jacob Jones and Craig Tarry photographed a sunfish washed up on the beach near the mouth of the Murray River, South Australia.
Word got out about the fish and
Ralph Foster the local expert who works at the South Australian Museum was swamped with calls. View
article on the ABC News site.
The fish was identified as an Ocean Sunfish, Mola mola. Ralph stated ""I've had a good look at it, we get three species here and this is actually the rarest one in South Australian waters," The other two are the Bump-head Sunfish, Mola alexandrini and the Hoodwinker Sunfish, Mola tecta. Ralph estimated that the fish was about 1.8 metres long. He stated, "this particular sunfish was on the smaller end of the scale in terms of size".
In her comment on the page, world Sunfish expert Marianne Nyegaard stated, "This is definitely Mola mola. Eye-balling it my guess is that it would cluster with the Pacific clade genetically, however there is at present no documented, official way of morphologically distinguishing the two genetic clades of Mola mola (Atlantic/Indian Ocean and Pacific)."
Thank you all for your contributions to this important observation.
