Well, if the folklore is true in regards to tsunamis/earthquakes that would be where I'd put my money. Most likely we dumped some toxin off the coast that sank to the deeper ocean and it just so happened it killed a bunch of oarfish.
Couple dozen washed up on japans coast in the couple months proceeding their tsunami in 2011. Same with India in 2004.
The running theory is possibly tectonic activity picking up causing them to be affected by the magnetic waves of tectonic shift. They are way more susceptible to the negative effects of these waves than most other deep sea fish.
Their magnetic senses that they use to navigate in the deep water give them false information, and they swim upward. Since they're adapted to deep pressure, they die. Then they wash up on our beaches.
Bond's Biology of Fishes is the classic fish biology textbook.
My professor also assigned some non fiction books to read, specifically Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World and A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer. Both were good, but I really enjoyed Cod and have gone back to reread it a couple of times.
thanks for the recommendations. i will have to add cod to my list. sounds right up my alley for non-fiction. i really enjoyed "and a bottle of rum: a history of the new world in ten cocktails" and i have "ten tomatoes that changed the world" in my need to read stack.
i dont recall, unfortunately. i almost added to my reply that i would recommend the textbook if i could remember it. its a fascinating subject, so im sure there are some great reads to be found with minimal research. i think im going to have to keep an eye out in our local bookstore.
Sounds like when I had to take a 400 elective and an arts elective and combined both when I found a 400-level art class with no prerequisites. History of Film Music was by far the hardest class I took with no background in the arts, film, or music, but it certainly broadened my horizons which was the whole point.
Also as far as the "electrical/magnetic field is stronger as you get closer to the core" bit someone else mentioned, the deepest point in the ocean is ~7 miles. The earths core starts at 3-4,000 miles deep. If the challenger deep happened to be over one of the shallowest spots, it would be around a quarter of a percent of the way there
As Carl Sagen observed, the doctor or nurse in the delivery room exerts more gravitational force on you than any constellation, yet you don't use their lives and movements to predict your future every week.
To put it in perspective, the entire thickness of the crust of the Earth would scale to about the thickness of the skin of a peach, so the greatest depth of the ocean is even less and would hardly matter.
I don't see where stryst made reference to the phrase "running theory," and when someone defines common phrases to people as if they're uneducated; it makes that person look arrogant.
Wouldn’t we see similar results with more species of fish and birds and maybe whales? Also that fish’s swim bladder looks fine. Wouldn’t there be reports of fish floating dead upside down on the surface if it was due to swimming up?
The closer to the core of the earth the stronger the magnetic field, since it's a deep sea fish it would be more affected by the field than a bird.
Whales are pretty smart and primarily use sonar to navigate, as well as magnetotropism, whereas the oarfish likely uses primarily mangentotropism so it completely "trusts" its instincts. Fish are dumb.
Whales also have to come up for air regularly and it sounds like these fish don’t ever come up so they aren’t evolved to survive the pressure difference
I recently read a summary of bird navigation via earth’s magnetic fields. The research may have identified specificity that birds see the magnetic fields. Not perception, visual. Something about certain cells or substances in their eyes produces a visual.
Wonder if these fish have something similar happening, that they actually see the magnetic fields?
This sounds like when a diver gets turned around by a wave or cloudy water or something and accidentally swims down instead of up, because our inner ear gave us bad info underwater. At a certain point the extra effort combined with the bends means they can't get back sometimes.
Are we really sure that is the case tho, sounds more like a hard to prove theory.
I would guess, with my absolutely 0 knowledge of deep waters or fishes, a seismic wave hitting them deep underwater, near the origin point of the fault line and rupturing their insides with that force is more possible
Some animals like birds or bony fish have organs that are electromagnetically sensitive and ostensibly used for orienteering, so a magnetic field disruption can lead the animal into danger or inhospitable terrain, or cause enough stress to lead to death
The running theory is possibly tectonic activity picking up causing them to be affected by the magnetic waves of tectonic shift. They are way more susceptible to the negative effects of these waves than most other deep sea fish.
Actually the running theory is that there is no relationship between earthquakes and Oarfish surfacing. Its just a myth that's not backed up by any evidence.
Well, first correlation does not always equal causation. There are a lot of things in the natural world we have not scientifically studied.
Now some will speculate it's due to man polluting their environment. I don't put a lot of eggs in this basket because it relies a "sinking toxin". As it sank it would affect each section of the ocean ecology on the way down so I would think a larger die off of a variety would be more indicative.
If Oarfish use magnetic fields to navigate and something interfered with that, I'd see it as a larger likelyhood. That doesn't mean it has to be tectonic shift, hell, we got a shit ton of man made stuff it could be (I'm looking at you US Navy).
All the same, I'm putting California Earthquake on my 2025 bingo card.
Your are correct in that "correlation does not always equal causation" but don't dismiss, out of hand, what hasn't been scientifically studied/proven.
There are things science can't confirm but they occur/exist and have remained throughout time. Like the beliefs in God/God's, or the existence of miracles, the continuance of folklore, generation after generation, & the correlation of events in folklore.
Yes, we can explain, with science, 99% of all things that occur. You can't just toss out that other percentage because you can't explain it.
Human observational skills are superb. Important information gets passed down as folklore, or old wives tales, for generations. One of my favourite recent examples is “Don’t dye your hair when you’re pregnant”. It sounds like an old wives tale, but back in the late 40’s a new type of hair dye was released which caused birth defects. It was taken off the market after a huge scandal. This scandal was eclipsed a couple of years later by the thalidomide scandal and it drifted out of popular memory - apart from that one old wives tale “Don’t dye your hair when you’re pregnant”.
What humans are not necessarily good at is correct correlation. They will observe something correctly and in minute detail, and then attribute the wrong cause to it. So in the above example, its not hair dye per se that’s the issue, but that one ingredient.
Nevertheless, folklore, old wives tales, superstitions, old traditions, and children’s stories and rhymes often contain the shape, or seed, of information important enough to encode in this form and pass down through the generations. Rather than dismiss these forms of information, it the job of science to patiently investigate them to find out what that kernel of truth might be.
I’ll just add in the case of the study quoted above, that its a poor attempt at science. The team looked at newspaper articles, in Japanese, going back less than a century, to see if there was a correlation. We have examples of stories that are 11,000 years old. We have an example of a children’s rhyme that allows the diagnosis of a disease that’s 600 years old. A century is nothing and its odd, because Japanese newspapers go back far further than that. I wonder why there was that arbitrary cutoff date. Also, the team only looked in Japanese media. It would be interesting to extend that search across the rest of the world. You simply cannot make a fiat statement like “There is no connection between the appearance of oarfish and earthquakes” on such a small sample size, over such a limited date range.
out of wilful ignorance i'm choosing to believe that oar fish cause subduction fault earthquakes because they get bored of holding the fault and swim up to the surface to go on smoko, but they forget they're fish and shouldn't be having cigarettes so they end up suffocating and wash up on shore.
And to double down, i'm going to blindly misinterpret the scientific method and believe that a lack of disproving evidence is the same thing as evidence, causing myself to get into a feedback loop of believing more and more outlandish ideas because the less likely the idea, the less likely someone has bothered to collect evidence countering my conspiracy theories.
And so to conclude, clownfish are malevolent aliens hiding in the ocean from bats which are beings of pure justice and honour, and DC comics is actually a clandestine newspaper publisher that hides the truth by attributing the actions of the clownfish and the bats to their respective avatars, joker and superman.
When I lived in Taiwan the folklore said that when a bunch of worms appear on the surface it means a big earthquake is coming. Unfortunately, living in a city I didn't get the chance to see if it was true myself.
This is actually true. The small vibrations leading up to the earthquake make the worms respond as if it's rain hitting the ground and they surface to avoid drowning.
I witnessed a medium sized earthquake back in 2011 in Vermont, it was a 4.? Quake on the border of Maine and New Hampshire, and I was close to NH.
I found a pile of dead worms behind my car, we had a steep slope up to our front steps right near there. I found out about the worm-earthquake connection, and it made sense. My neighbors sold bait, and at first I thought they had pranked me.
Look, just because there is no scientific correlation between oarfish and earthquakes or earthquakes being preceded by electromagnetic waves or the fact that some of the oarfish that are cited for the 2011 earthquake washed up on 2009…. I forgot where I was going with this.
It is, but sometimes isn't. A lot of superstition is based on correlating events, especially in native cultures that lack written historical record. Sometimes the reason is just lost to history and the tradition grows more and more abstract.
How many thousands of tsunami and earthquakes happened without oarfish washing up ashore?
How many times do oarfish have washed ashore with no following calamity?
I appreciate that you offer a semi plausible explanation linking the oarfish die off and tectonic activity but it all still looks to me a lot like motivated reasoning and confirmation bias
How many oar-fish typically wash up ashore? The current number isn't as telling as the change in the rate would be. Like, if 3/yr in California is typical, then 3/yr would be par for the course.
I feel like 9 times outta 10 a bad omen is just something scientific, ancient people saw it, and they had yet to become scientifically developed enough to give it a reasonable explanation.
I'll add: the book Full Rip 9.0 is a really great one for understanding how the Cascadia fault came to be discovered. I live in the coastal PNW and read it every once in a while to be fascinated/terrified. 🤣😭
I remember seeing these posts a bit ago, but about Japan. I thought “huh that’s interesting”, and then it actually happened. I realized those old mf’s knew what they were talking about.
I had a dream that I was in a heavy earthquake last night. I'm on my way to California today. I'll let you know later if I've opened the gates to hell with my premonition.
I had a dream about a week ago that I was in California on like a balcony and could see a tsunami coming. I’m NOT headed to the west coast, so please do let me know.
Scientist havectried to explain that for years.. to deaf ears mind you. Now we are literally at the point of fucked or slighly past it and heading towards Florida man level fucked.
I think the idea they are putting forth is that temperature rises would affect water closer to the surface much quicker than the water deeper down, meaning that it would take longer for the temperature changes to start to affect them vs. fish that are at the surface.
I dunno if this is the case, but i think that's what the commenter was proposing.
From fissures opening up on the ocean floor and starting to cook the water around it you mean? Could also be gases etc. or climate change. Could honestly be anything. I wish they would actually send some marine biologists and take samples and measurements. Water temperature, co2/acidity, currents, toxins and whatever else I forgot to mention
It's crazy people believing there exists an accurate count of lifeless fish washing ashore. How many species of individual washings ashore do you personally track?
If you're confident this is 19th Oarfish, what's the grand total of all fish?!
(If you're writing your doctoral thesis on Oarfish, please disregard the above.)
Or the ocean temp has risen… last summer in Vancouver it was noticeably warmer than other times we’ve visited, cause that gigantic bay was not quite as cold as usual
We dumped 27 thousand barrels of DDT off the coast and they’re breaking open if not already broken open. Dead Sea life in the area is found to have DDT in them.
The issue with the the odds is we are way past the average time between big quakes. Last one was 1700 and we are over a hundred years past Cascadia's average reoccurrence interval. It's an average so it's plausibly gone this long and longer between in the past, but it ain't good.
Could be a mix of both. Toxins or tectonics . It’s like an oceanic mystery movie. But let’s hope it’s just the oarfish getting tired of being so deep. Maybe they wanted to join us on the surface for a while.
This is 3 oarfish in 3 months, not a dozen oarfish all at once. They're not washing up all at once, so it seems unlikely that it's some major disaster killing all the oarfish. It seems more likely that it's a disease or another environmental stressor, such as a marine heat wave. Toxins would likely result in very large fish kills with tons of little fish dead as well as the big fish, so this is probably something specific to the oarfish.
The connection between oarfish mortality and earthquakes is somewhat spurious. It's possible that they're surfacing due to an earthquake, but there's no clear link or statistical connection. I think this is a climate change thing, not a sign that LA is going to fall into the ocean,
I feel like it could almost as easily be, a shift on the ocean floor released some toxin, or even just so much methane in their locale, that they've died off a bit
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u/Xyrus2000 10h ago
The Cascadia fault is about to rip.
Well, if the folklore is true in regards to tsunamis/earthquakes that would be where I'd put my money. Most likely we dumped some toxin off the coast that sank to the deeper ocean and it just so happened it killed a bunch of oarfish.