Mola Mola Studies

Some studies from reference photos and a mockup of how the anatomy might compare to a human's.

Some fun facts about these ugly, beautiful beasts:

• They can grow up to 10 feet long and are including fins are usually taller than they are long.
• Their babies are teeny tiny, and in their lifespan they can grow 60 million times their size at birth.   Females can lay more eggs at once than any other vertebrate, up to 300,000,000.
• They are related to pufferfish, and for some reason no one can agree whether or not they have the deadly tetrodotoxin like fugu.  I don't know why they can't just check.
• Their babies actually look like tiny pufferfish.  See below:

• They are predators but completely docile towards humans.  They are extremely uncoordinated and usually slowly drift along the current.  For a while they were technically considered plankton, until they were finally observed actively swimming.  They're not very good at it but they can do it if they must.  They're very difficult to keep in captivity because of their rapid growth, but also because they will bump into walls and hurt themselves.
• They get tons of skin parasites, so they swim through kelp fields and let little fish pick them off.
• They hunt in deeper, colder waters, but will die if their body temperature gets too low for too long.  They like to lay sideways on the surface of the water and bask in the sun to warm themselves up.
• 
• They can occasionally breach the surface up to 10 ft.  Probably to dislodge more parasites.  There was an incident where a mola landed in a boat, directly onto a 4 year old boy, who was somehow not injured.
• Sometimes their dorsal fin sticks out of the water and are often mistaken for sharks.  You can easily tell it's a Mola because their fins flop side to side.  Which is weird, by the way.
• They may or may not be able to feel pain.  They do not seem to react when animals come and bite chunks out of them.
• In the Mediterranean swordfish industry, up to 90% of their catches can be Molas.   That's not a typo.
• Despite looking like a dinosaur took a shit, they're one of the youngest species of fish in the world.  They seem to me like a weird evolutionary tangent that hasn't figured itself out yet.  I believe in them.  Probably should have kept their tail fins, though, if you ask me.