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A stroll on Black’s Beach, a day like hundreds of others, brought a shocking surprise to a San Diego man this past weekend.
Jay Beiler was walking on the beach under the glider airport in Torrey Pines last Saturday. It was almost sunset, he said, sometime around 4:40 pm when he stumbled across … it.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Beiler. “You know, I go to the beach quite often, so I know the area, but I’ve never seen an organism that looked so terrifying.”
What was it?
“At first I thought it was like a jellyfish or something, and then I took a closer look at it, and some other people gathered around it, and then I saw that it was this very unusual fish,” said Beiler.
What was so unusual about that?
“It’s the stuff of nightmares – the mouth looked almost bloody!” Said Beiler. I would say it was almost a foot long. “
Beiler took three photos of the beast and set off. It wasn’t until days later that he thought about sending the images to NBC 7. The photos show a mouth full of glittering, razor-sharp-looking teeth, a projectile pouring out of his forehead, and copious spikes teeming from his sides. As we are not fish scientists ourselves, we turned to the scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
“This is one of the larger species of anglerfish and has only been seen a few times here in California but has been found all over the Pacific Ocean,” said Ben Frable, the scripps marine vertebrate collection manager, Ben Frable.
Beiler’s find was a Pacific soccer fish, a type of deep-sea anglerfish, which became famous in “Finding Nemo” with a bioluminescent light on its head that acts as a bait.
In the photos that Beiler took, it is difficult to say how big the fish is. Scripps has another specimen in his collection that was found on Dog Beach in Del Mar in December 2001, said Frable, who zoomed in on NBC 7 from his lab, surrounded by jars of specimens and other scientific debris. This specimen appears to be about 18 inches long and a foot down from the top. Last week and the one found in 2001 were the only two ever found on the spot, as far as Frable knows.
Based on the pictures, some algae in the background, and other clues, Frable thinks San Diego’s 2021 edition of Himantolophus sagamius is smaller, despite being a full-grown female fish. The ichthyologist said he could tell by the fact that the females of the species have the bait and are much larger – up to 60 times larger – than their male counterparts, which do not have gnarled teeth.
Interesting fact: the male of the species is never allowed to eat anything during his adult life – “they are only there to reproduce,” says Frable.
The soccer fish has typically been found swimming in the ocean between 1,000 and 4,000 feet below the sea.
“How you have something so deep in the ocean … that washes up on the beach here in San Diego has in part to do with the underwater topography of the coast here on the coast, right up to La Jolla here – that was obviously found at Black’s” said the bearded, bespectacled, flanneled Frable. “A little further up the beach there are so-called submarine canyons, in which water and sediments run off and it can get really deep very quickly, very close to the shore.”
Beiler’s find was really a rare one, said Frable.
“The Pacific soccer fish is known from 30 specimens ever collected and brought to museums around the Pacific Ocean,” said the Scripps scientist. “I think few have been found here in California, but they have been found in Japan, all the way down to New Zealand, everywhere, and often they werehes up on beaches, so it’s not entirely sure why they wash up on beaches . “
Frable wanted to see if he could find it in Black’s Beach, but there are plenty of seagulls and plenty of crabs that probably outnumber him.
“We’ll try anyway, because these too are very, very rare and very valuable to science because we get such a rare look at them,” said Frable.
In addition to the fearsome teeth, the soccer fish also has spikes on its sides, another unusual sight. The wart tips are “a kind of bony protrusion,” said Frable, that could potentially be used for defense.
“So if a deep-sea shark or something comes and tries to bite it,” Frable said, “they have all these quills. Kind of like a puffer you know Not very appetizing when you put these spikes in your mouth. But they can have other purposes. We don’t know for sure. We don’t know much about the biology of these fish and that’s one of the reasons we want people to let us know when they find a beach so we can possibly learn a little more. “
So what should a casual beach goer do when they encounter something from below?
- Report it to the lifeguards, who will notify Scripps
- Send an email to Scripps at ScrippsNews@ucsd.edu
- Contact Scripps through its social media platforms
Frable does not recommend “taking anything home”, however, adding that “there are many marine sanctuaries along the California coast where all kinds of foraging are prohibited”.
When you’ve read this and seen the soccer fish and took photos or videos, Frable would like to speak to you. What if you brought it home? He really, really wants to talk to you.
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