Comments on: Oarfish Can Supposedly Predict Earthquakes, Apparently They Suck At It

By: Justin

Justin — Sat, 15 Mar 2014 16:53:06 +0000

In reply to Cameron. That is a big fish

By: Justin

Justin — Sat, 15 Mar 2014 16:51:49 +0000

In reply to Tina. Wow

By: Tom Fitzgerald

Tom Fitzgerald — Sun, 27 Oct 2013 13:45:07 +0000

I wonder; does the navy’s underwater activities have anything to do with the beaching of marine life?

By: Markus

Markus — Sun, 27 Oct 2013 10:39:07 +0000

As Cameron already noted, oarfish suffer notoriously from big-fish-stories and get nowhere as big as usually said. It´s a quite common phenomen that unconfirmed reports of alleged giant specimens found their way even into scientific literature and were copied and repeated again and again for decades or even more than a century. For some reasons even ichthyologists who should know better show often quite little sceptisism, even if there is nowhere any photographic or physical evidence for specimens as big as the claimed giants. For this reason you can still find a lot of claims of 4,5 m arapaimas, 5 m wels catfish, 8 m sturgeons or in this case 11 m oarfish. There are of course many more cases, especially among fish and reptiles. In some cases it´s even possible to track down the original sources from which the phantastic sizes come from, and like in the case of the arapaima it came out it was nothing but hearsay with massive contradictions.
Over the time of more than a century a lot of oarfish were recorded around the world, and as they are so extremely unusual in appearance, the discoveries were probably made public in a lot of cases, and photos taken as well. But yet, among all the oarfish which were photographed or even completely or partly preserved for collections, none was only close to the often cited maximum length of 11 m. The very largest ones were around 6 m, what is already much more than average, and then there is this huge specimen of around 7 m found at the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado in 1996. Some years ago there was a specimen found in Mexico which was said to be 8 m in length, but a quite simple measurement at the photo revealed it was in fact only around 6 m. The famous specimen in the Natural History Museum at Vienna is 6 m in length, and was at this time at the upper end of confirmed sizes, and actually, it still is.
So if oarfish would really reach 11 m, we would know much more specimens of 7, 8, 9 or 10 m. You have to keep in mind that weight increases with the cube, and an 11 m oarfish would be around 7 times as massive as a 6 m specimen, which is already an exception. What´s even weirder is the fact that the claimed sizes for Regalecus glesne don´t stop at 11 m. Many authors give even maximum lengths of 14 m, 17 m or even more than 20 m. I think none of them has really an idea how big such a fish would really be. And the real problem is that people want to believe in such claims, because it´s a cool imagination such huge beasts are out there in the seas. It was not that long ago that you could find 11 m as maximum length for the great white shark in many books, and the erroneous 18 m or 21 m for the giant squid are still quite common even in the latest literature.
Even if we keep in mind that the very largest oarfish are bigger than the largest ones which were actually confirmed, it´s quite unprobable they are much bigger than the very largest on record, what would indicate a maximum length of around 7 to possibly 8 m at the very extreme.

By: If Oarfish Predict Earthquakes, They are Doing a Really Lousy Job | Old Salt Blog – a virtual port of call for all those who love the sea

Sat, 26 Oct 2013 14:02:14 +0000

[…] If oarfish do predict quakes they are doing a really bad job at it. Or, as Dr. Craig McClain, of DeepSeaNews, […]

By: Tina

Tina — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 04:12:44 +0000

Well, they may suck at it – but you have to admit it is kinda funny that there was a quake only a couple days later. LOL!

By: Dr. M

Dr. M — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 00:29:41 +0000

Yes Yes I know everyone that a earthquake happened of Japan. Still if oarfish washing ashore in California are predicting any scale earthquake in any part of the world…well then oarfish still suck at predicting earthquakes.

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 00:20:33 +0000

M 7.3 Earthquake
Off the east coast of Honshu, Japan
7 hours ago – U.S. Geological Survey
An earthquake with magnitude 7.3 occurred near Iwaki, Honshu, Japan at 17:10:16.70 UTC on Oct 25, 2013 …

By: anon

anon — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:59:11 +0000

7.6 now. Apparently your article’s headline sucks.

By: ken

ken — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:37:31 +0000

Funny… http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/10/25/73-magnitude-earthquake-hits-japan/