Why 75,000 People Were Wrong About This Animal.

   / @planetbelow   Few animals have a worse reputation than the ocean sunfish: too big, too flat, too slow to get anywhere, living on jellyfish and lazing at the surface while gulls peck at its skin. Electronic tags, animal-borne cameras and DNA from stomach contents tell another story. So why would a fish this heavy spend so much of its day lying flat in the sunshine? What does it really eat? Has anyone ever checked whether it is stupid? And how did an entire species of it go unrecognised by science until 2017? More from the deep: ▸ Its most common catch on camera is a siphonophore. Some of those grow longer than a blue whale, and they aren't one animal →    • The Longest Animal On Earth Is Not An Animal   ▸ Orcas have been filmed ramming a sunfish to pieces. So why has no wild orca ever killed a person? →    • There Is Nothing Stopping Killer Whales Fr...   ▸ Science missed a second sunfish species until 2017. It missed a 13-metre predatory squid for a whole century →    • How A Giant 13 Meter Predator Squid Avoide...   00:00 Flat out at the surface 01:46 Where the reputation started 03:34 Pufferfish relatives with no tail 05:59 Swimming like a penguin 08:02 Down into the cold 09:54 Warming up at the surface 12:40 Tuna, swordfish and a mako 15:04 What's really in the stomach 17:41 From a few millimetres to two tonnes 19:40 So is it dumb? 21:46 300 million eggs? 23:05 Gulls and parasites 24:53 A species hiding in plain sight 26:59 Caught by mistake 28:51 Back at the surface Every fact in this film comes from published research and field records. Key sources: Nakamura, Goto & Sato, J. Anim. Ecol., 2015 · Watanabe & Sato, PLOS ONE, 2008 (figures in film, CC BY) · Sims et al., PLOS ONE, 2009 (figures in film, CC BY) · Pan et al., GigaScience, 2016 · Gomes-Pereira et al., J. Fish Biol., 2023 · Potter & Howell, 2010 · Tokunaga et al., J. Anim. Ecol., 2025 · Morrissette, Franck & Block, J. Exp. Biol., 2003 · Sousa et al., Sci. Rep., 2016 · Santoro et al., Front. Vet. Sci., 2020 · Nyegaard et al., Zool. J. Linn. Soc., 2018 · Sawai & Nyegaard, Zootaxa, 2023 · Thys et al., J. Exp. Mar. Biol. Ecol., 2015 · Silvani, Gazo & Aguilar, Biol. Conserv., 1999 · Cartamil & Lowe, Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser., 2004 · Ayres et al., Front. Ethol., 2026 (video in film, CC BY 4.0) · NOAA Fisheries, California drift gillnet bycatch report · Australian Museum species profiles · Smithsonian Magazine, "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Ocean Sunfish". ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ FOOTAGE AND IMAGES CC BY 3.0, via YouTube — Gonzalo Mucientes · Roser Gari Perez · Andrew Gordon · Hisa · Michael Elizarov · Ludovic Mazzuca · Ceningan Divers · AQUATRAVEL · Marie-Claire Le Mercier · diving-vsegda · Buceo Aqualia La Herradura · h3llr71s3r · Hans-Petter Fjeld · Partir en Indonésie · Eduardo A. Mahauad · Yuki2009tube · Living Sea Images · wrcioffi · FLIPPER dive center · Matsulabs · Scuba with Suwena · East Mediterranean marine life · bertsplci · missionmtb · Jesus Sagastizabal · DrowningDiver · TrueCAT8 · Rehman5000 · NOAA Sanctuaries. CC BY 4.0 — Ahuir-Baraja et al., Parasites & Vectors, 2015 (Fig. 1) · Nesnad · Ellen Rykers, via iNaturalist, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0 — Justin Pater, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.5 — Aranda et al., PLOS ONE, 2013 (video S2), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0 — Maarten Heerlien · Laszlo Ilyes, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY — Dominique Pelletier / Ifremer, via Wikimedia Commons. Pexels License — Lachlan Ross · Leo Salom. Public domain / CC0 — NOAA Ocean Exploration · NOAA Fisheries (Eric Orbeson) · NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center (Mark Conlin) · NOAA gillnet illustration · gregs, via iNaturalist · David Starr Jordan, A Guide to the Study of Fishes (1905), via Project Gutenberg · P. V. Reyes, "Enormous Sunfish" (1910), Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons. The Internet Owes This Fish an Apology.