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Darrell Rae was on a Sunday morning stroll on Malibu Colony beach when he spotted the 12-foot-long silvery fish with a brilliant red mane and scarlet dorsal fin floundering in the water a few dozen feet from the shore.
Oarfish are largely a mystery to scientists, but they are typically found 700 to 3,000 feet beneath the surface in tropical and temperate waters, where they feed on small squid and krill.
Bearing a closer resemblance to the Loch Ness Monster than a perch or mackerel, the oarfish can grow to more than 30 feet in length and is credited with spawning many of the sea serpent legends told by sailors over the years.
Rare serpentine oarfish appears on Malibu shore
Seeded on Sat Dec 4, 2010 2:49 PM EST
Article Source: The San Francisco Chronicle- Enjoy this article? Help vote it up the 'Vine.
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Smart kid -
But the first to correctly identify the serpentine creature was an 8-year-old boy who recognized it from school and strode up beside the adults to inform them: It's an oarfish.
"He knew exactly what it was," Rae said. "He spoke with conviction about this fish that none of the adults even had a clue about."
Biologists with the California Wildlife Center arrived and corroborated the boy's assessment: It was indeed an oarfish, a species rarely seen this far from the deep sea, where it is believed to reign as the longest bony fish in the ocean.
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