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An unusual sight appeared on the generally gentle north coast of Oregon: a large, colorful, stranded opah fish, weighing around 100 pounds.
The opah, or sunfish, is “rare on the Oregon coast,” according to the aquarium in Seaside, a town in the upstate where the fish appeared on a beach. The fish is over 3 feet long, with a round, orange and silver body dotted with white spots.
Opah can grow to over 6 feet and weigh over 600 pounds, living on the open seas in tropical, high-temperature waters where they feast on krill and squid. It is unusual, but not uncommon, for them to venture this far north into the normally cooler waters of northern Oregon.
The appearance of the fish caused “quite a stir”, according to Seaside Aquarium, which will freeze the animal until the start of the school year so that “a lucky school group can dissect this big fish.”
The Pacific Northwest of the United States has been baked by record high temperatures in recent weeks, while a massive heat wave off Vancouver has left around a billion sea creatures, mussels and clams cooking in their own shells.
Scientists said such heat would have been “virtually impossible” without man-made climate change, although it is not clear whether this had a role in the appearance of opah in Oregon. .
“We are seeing some marine organisms moving north as the temperature of the oceans increases,” Heidi Dewar, research biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, told the Washington Post, although she added that it was difficult to say exactly what caused the opah to run aground.
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