Divers off the coast of Taiwan have encountered a giant oarfish. The creature often associated with mythical significance and believed to be a precursor to earthquakes. In a viral Instagram video, the divers can be seen observing the shiny silver fish, which had peculiar holes in its body, while swimming near the water’s surface near Ruifang. One of the divers even dared to touch the legendary sea serpent, also known as the “earthquake fish.”
The divers estimated that the oarfish was about 6-and-a-half feet long, which is impressive but not as big as they can get. Oarfish are the longest bony fish in the world, reaching up to 56 feet in length.
Sadly, the oarfish spotted in Taiwan waters may have been a sign of its poor health.
“It must have been dying, so it swam into shallower waters,” said Wang Cheng-Ru, a diving instructor who had never seen an oarfish before in his years of scuba diving.
Cookie-cutter shark
Experts speculate that a cookie-cutter shark caused the peculiar circular holes on the fish’s body. The cookie-cutter shark is notorious for biting chunks out of the flesh of large fish. This small predator is notorious for taking bites out of the flesh of large fish, whales, and even nuclear submarines (though the latter might be perplexing).
The oarfish’s visit to the surface may also have been a bad sign for us, according to some locals who believe that these fish — which live at depths of between 656 and 3,200 feet below the ocean’s surface — are a warning of an upcoming earthquake.
This belief is based on Japanese folklore. It states that the slender fish will deliberately rise to the surface and beach themselves before a big quake.
This fear increased after the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami. Dozens of these supposed sea-based seismographs had washed ashore in the two years . This is before disasters