Fernandina Island
Holy mola! What a day! We saw lots of weird and strange animals today. There were flightless cormorants, penguins on the equator, diving blue footed boobies and much much more. All in all we had some fabulous explorations and I hope you all enjoyed yourselves.
One of the most memorable times today was the Mola mola, or ocean sunfish. Some of us even got to go in the water with them. That is an experience very few people on the earth can say they have had.
These huge fishes begin life as any typical fish, in the form of a small egg, but they reach gargantuan sizes. They are actually considered the largest bony fish on the planet. The remarkable thing is that from the newly hatched larval stage to the adult, an ocean sunfish experiences an increase of 60,000,000 times its original weight.
Here in the Galápagos, these fish are rarely observed so I can’t overstate how fortunate we were to have seen several of these curious creatures. They have only been photographed and observed in open water off the west coasts of Isabela and Fernandina. Numbers of these Mola molas have been quite low in the last few years especially since the El Niño of ’97-’98. If what we witnessed this morning was any sign, then who knows, they could be on the road to recovery.
Holy mola! What a day! We saw lots of weird and strange animals today. There were flightless cormorants, penguins on the equator, diving blue footed boobies and much much more. All in all we had some fabulous explorations and I hope you all enjoyed yourselves.
One of the most memorable times today was the Mola mola, or ocean sunfish. Some of us even got to go in the water with them. That is an experience very few people on the earth can say they have had.
These huge fishes begin life as any typical fish, in the form of a small egg, but they reach gargantuan sizes. They are actually considered the largest bony fish on the planet. The remarkable thing is that from the newly hatched larval stage to the adult, an ocean sunfish experiences an increase of 60,000,000 times its original weight.
Here in the Galápagos, these fish are rarely observed so I can’t overstate how fortunate we were to have seen several of these curious creatures. They have only been photographed and observed in open water off the west coasts of Isabela and Fernandina. Numbers of these Mola molas have been quite low in the last few years especially since the El Niño of ’97-’98. If what we witnessed this morning was any sign, then who knows, they could be on the road to recovery.
