This is only the 20th oarfish sighting statewide in 123 years.

Appearing like a dragon from the deep, a dead oarfish appeared to a group of friends enjoying the ocean at La Jolla Cove, during a moment at the intersection of luck, community teamwork and scientific knowledge.

The friends were kayaking and snorkeling around 1 p.m. Aug. 10 when they came upon the oarfish, an exceptionally rare deep-sea fish: this is only the 20th oarfish to have washed up in California since 1901, according to Scripps Institution of Oceanography fish expert Ben Frable.

“Oarfish are rarely encountered here in California,” Frable said.

The oarfish discovery was “impromptu,” said Emily Miller, one of those snorkelers who came upon the creature on a sunny Saturday, but also serendipitous: Miller is a research associate at California Sea Grant with an office on the SIO campus and knew the significance of what she and her friends were seeing.

A group of kayakers and snorkelers came upon this oarfish. Photo taken by Michael Wang.

“There’s a lot of tourism in that area,” Miller said. “Lots of people were looking at it, and when we came across it, I was really surprised that it had been there all day. I was fortunate enough to have my phone and know who to call to contact the authorities.”

She called Frable, the SIO Marine Vertebrate Collection manager, and NOAA fish biologist Owyn Snodgrass, arranging to deliver the oarfish to SIO, a premier research facility in SIO “just up the street,” she said.

“This is a great collection opportunity,” Miller added. “I said something like, ‘This is a fish emergency.’”

“Delivering” the oarfish meant swimming and escorting it to The Shores, where NOAA researchers could retrieve it and carry it away on a truck.

The group achieved this with the help of “two really amazing paddle boarders,” Miller said, who “saw us struggling and assisted with getting the oarfish [to the] shore.”

Photo taken by Monica DeYoung.

“It was just a really amazing community effort,” she said, highlighting the ease of transporting the flat oarfish on the similarly flat paddleboard. 

“Everybody was transfixed by how cool this animal was,” Miller said. 

Frable understands the fascination: “This is a pretty interesting fish,” he said. “It looks very different from the normal fish morphology.”

In other parts of the world including Japan and Taiwan, oarfish are more common, he said.

Oarfish are found offshore in the open ocean, in the upper parts of the deep sea called the mesopelagic zone, “where, as you go deeper in the ocean, sunlight dissipates, so it gets darker and darker,” Frable said, about 600 to 3,000 feet under the surface.

The oarfish is the longest fish among the major group of fishes that have bone-based skeletons, as opposed to cartilaginous fish, which include sharks and rays.