I’ve encountered a couple of these Sunfish (“Mola mola”) in the wild off the coast of Southern California. They’re absolutely incredible to see in person and massive! While it seemed to enjoy our presence we made sure not to get too close or they might mistake your boat for a rock and try to flop on board, which is the only way they’ve ever killed a human. I’ve read they move to warmer waters as they age and the ones I saw were “only” around 800-1200 pounds. The ones around Indonesia can be 3000 pounds or more. Fascinating creature.
Also, they famously carry a huge number of parasites. This just seems normal for the species, similar to how sloth fur supports a variety of organisms.
It's normal for all species, humans included. We generally aren't carrying large loads of parasites, but that's not because not doing so is normal. It's because we put tremendous effort into getting rid of them. This is one of the theories for why human body temperature seems to have lowered since the measurement was standardized at 37 C.
We "met" a king penguin at Singapore Bird Paradise that would follow people around at the edge of the tank (an acrylic sheet separated you from their enclosure) and try to interact. It swam up to my wife and followed her around, then went to another bunch of people and did the same. It seemed to enjoy watching people watching it and waving to it. Not every animal does, but this one did.
I’m not sure if it applies with all birds, but many seem to become fixated on humans. This can happen if you care for very young, sick or injured birds. My wife cares for various sad cases and if she isn’t careful they stay with with us.
We have 4 pigeons at the moment, with various issues. I call them our rehoming pigeons. Do you want a pigeon?
Funny enough, my late father was a veterinarian and we had a pigeon that we raised from a chick (we weren't sure what this thoroughly ugly bird was and it turned out it was a pigeon). It was very tame and lived in a hutch on the back porch, and would watch for us to come back from the electric pole out the front. Unfortunately its knowledge of cats was limited to our extremely lazy ones and one day it disappeared; we suspect it got eaten.
I became friends with a mallard while living near a pond, he would follow me when I walked to the bus stop, and greet me while on my way home (closer to home, he wouldn't typically leave the apartment complex, thankfully).
one year, he disappeared, which added a lot of sadness to my life. that summer, he reappeared and walked up a hill to greet me, with his mate and ducklings in tow. his mate had had a shattered (and repaired) beak, and was easy to pick out, and he spent time walking between us with "quack quack quack", back and forth, as if to introduce us. they stayed around at least until I moved a year or so later. by far the most profound experience I've had with a "wild" animal, a memorable experience that I will continue to cherish.
We treated a pigeon back to health from a failed cat attack - healthy enough to eat and walk, but not fly. It took a while but she eventually fully regained her ability to fly.
She had some rather distinct markings and would hang around the house pretty regularly after that. Then one day outside she was getting seriously groomed by a larger pigeon and wow is that where that term comes from?
Anyhow yeah she returned the grooming (which I'd later look up was her way of saying 'yeah I'm down - let's go') and I never saw her, or him, again.
So yeah - there could've been a happier ending there, especially because when a cat does eat a pigeon there tends to be evidence left.
An alternative last resort could have been to let small groups of real people in to see the sunfish during renovations. It could even be a PR thing with a lottery or something for the lucky sunfish companions.
I understand the conservation aspect of aquariums and all the good things that come out of it (research, etc) but it still makes me a bit sad when I read things like this.
The better ones take really good care of the animals within.
And I think they serve an important and not-irreplaceable purpose - exposure. They help show ordinary people, many of whom live in cities with no exposure to real nature, just what out there is worth protecting. I think it helps build public support for things like reducing waste, better fishing and hunting practices, the importance of parks and preserves, wildlife crossings, etc.
Sure, you can see them on your phone. But the result is completely different than seeing them with your own eyes.
Any article about cardboard standees in japanese aquariums is incomplete without reference to Grape-kun, a penguin who fell in love with a cardboard cutout from an anime promotion.
They live in the middle of big oceans. Whenever I've found one in the wild, there is nothing nearby, so I imagine an empty tank is the best way to replicate that.
I'm surprised to see so many comments solely about how aquariums/zoos are cruel and feeling sorry for this particular fish, when it's a species that is regularly hunted. I wouldn't want to be locked in a cage/tank either, but by ending up in a well run aquarium this sunfish is doing better than 99.999% of sunfish that have encountered humans.
This isn't a screed against eating fish or meat; I eat both. There are a lot of unethical practices in these industries that I'd like to see greatly improved, but putting a few individuals in an enclosure where there is at least some research and educational value seems like not even a rounding error on the state of animal welfare.
Being cared for by conscientious humans, providing enrichment and variety, can be better than living in the wild. For any animal, living in the wild, life span tends to be short, and life tends to be brutal. Prey animals are hunted, and they scrounge for food; finding a steady, reliable, nutritious, and tasty source of food in the wild is vanishingly rare. Dealing with parasites, illness, injury, predation, and all the other stress and constant threats to life is why wild animals are dangerous. Peaceful, fulfilling, life is incredibly rare.
It's even incredibly rare for humans - we're currently in an age of plenty and abundance, with more people living better lives than at any other point in the history of our species.
Overfishing and the geopolitical nature of enforcement and exploitation aren't something we can affect at an individual level, but these aquarium staff are doing a good thing, making a pretty good life for a sunfish. An actual companion would be better, but as long as the cutouts are triggering relief for whatever social needs being affected, that's a good deal for the sunfish.
I was commenting to my wife the other day... it seems to me that there are very few wild animals that just die from being too old. Not an expert, but it seems to me that most animals in the wild live until they are brutally ripped apart and eaten alive by another animal, and it's only a matter of time -- very rarely reaching an age old enough to just die.
Very few other animals put energy (either directly or through abstractions like "money", "welfare", and "centralized monopolies on the legitimate use of violence") into sustaining members of the species/group that can no longer defend and feed themselves.
Humans in the developed world do this so well that very few of them are even required to defend and feed themselves without these abstractions.
The interesting thing is predator and prey both die when they get too slow. Not sure which side has a worse ending there! Then there's disease or even a simple scratch getting infected.
The world's a brutal place, probably all worlds. Because the very nature of evolution means species that exploit the most thrive the most. The obvious exception of things like a solar feeding plant isn't even an exception. The great oxidation event caused one of the greatest mass extinctions on the planet - we evolved to thrive on oxygen but for most of the other life alive at the time it'd be like if plants today produced cyanide gas.
Even a slight injury to a predator can mean a slow death by starvation.
That's why videogame predators are so ridiculous. They keep coming after you, even when half their ass is blown away. A real predator will bugger off, as soon as it figures out that there might be a cost to attacking you. That's a big reason that many herbivore defenses seem kind of ridiculous, but work. They just need to make the predator nervous. Unless the predator is starving, it's likely to seek prey elsewhere.
There's also tremendous competition between predators.
The issue is about whether the animal is forced to endure pain, not weather we eat it or not. The same is true for how we keep the animals we eat, and why people are rightfully upset about how some cows and chickens and the like are kept during their short lives before slaughter.
Essentially, having the animal be free before we catch and immediately and hopefully quickly kill it for food is fine. Keeping it in a zoo where it's not suffering is fine.
Keeping it in poor conditions before we kill and eat it is not fine. Keeping it in poor conditions in a zoo is not fine.
This story is interesting in that it gives insight into the mental state of these zoo animals, something that is often hard for the public to see and understand. It should make you pause to consider if we're really keeping these animals in humane conditions, given that apparently even fish have possibly more complex internal mental states than we assume.
Agree. There's a provocative word you don't mention: hypocrisy.
This has become my reflexive internal response when I hear complaining about small-beer animal cruelty. Why are we so quick to empathize with this sunfish, and so slow to do it for creatures whose products most of us eat every single day? The horror show of factory farming creates many orders of magnitude more suffering than all these little anecdotes put together.
Zoos are cruel? Hypocrisy. Circuses are cruel? Hypocrisy. Bullfighting is cruel? Hypocrisy. Euthanizing stray dogs is cruel? Hypocrisy. Using animals in a film shoot is cruel? Hypocrisy. Keeping a single guinea pig is cruel? Hypocrisy (but against the law in Germany). And so on.
People in developed countries have become very good at dealing with cognitive dissonance.
The internet in general finds the black in the rainbow, Hacker News is typically better in quality of argument as it tends to attract a more intellectual crowd, but the overall tendency is the same.
Additionally, most of us are taught "hurting things is bad" as children and many adults have a hard time reconciling that we have to intentionally hurt at least some living things to live, hurt an even greater amount of living things to flourish, and at a certain point decreasing suffering in one dimension increases it in another.
For those who haven't developed a more mature framework, they tend to revert to the childhood "hurting things is bad" lesson, and an alternative framework based on nuance and context around suffering is too emotionally painful for them to accept, even if they can intellectually admit to the logic.
> is typically better in quality of argument as it tends to attract a more intellectual crowd
On behalf of the more intellectual crowd, I'm obliged to devastatingly elucidate that we're (quite singularly) more intrinsically adept at forcefully projecting ex post facto rationalizations upon our--invariably and universally--emotional decision-making processes whilst obfuscating the same under an avalanche of loquacious hifalutinisms.
Big Zoos, yes. And they do some great research, as well as preservation and rehabilitation. But I've also been to a few small zoos in rural America that are essentially someone's private animal collection that they charge you a fee to see. I think those are less common than they used to be, but they do exist.
Zoos are a lesser evil argument, locally they are not the best for the animals but they provide globally long-term benefits for humans and nature as well.
The implication here is that it would be impossible to fund conservation without zoos. As a counter argument: we could just do it. Increase taxes by the amount people spend in zoos and spend that on conservation. The only argument in favour of the zoo over that other approach is that people want to look at animals in cages.
A world with no zoos and less appreciation and consideration for nature as well as the long term necessity of caring for it?
I’m wondering about creating more nature parks instead of zoos. Of course not as accessible for people in cities, but could be a much better compromise.
In general, we should avoid putting animals in small cages as much as possible.
Speaking of nature parks instead of zoos, the San Diego Wild Safari Park is just that. Very large enclosed pastures with multiple species living alongside each other.
I’ve encountered a couple of these Sunfish (“Mola mola”) in the wild off the coast of Southern California. They’re absolutely incredible to see in person and massive! While it seemed to enjoy our presence we made sure not to get too close or they might mistake your boat for a rock and try to flop on board, which is the only way they’ve ever killed a human. I’ve read they move to warmer waters as they age and the ones I saw were “only” around 800-1200 pounds. The ones around Indonesia can be 3000 pounds or more. Fascinating creature.
The ones I've seen get scared pretty easily, and when scared will rocket off awfully fast.
Also, they famously carry a huge number of parasites. This just seems normal for the species, similar to how sloth fur supports a variety of organisms.
It's normal for all species, humans included. We generally aren't carrying large loads of parasites, but that's not because not doing so is normal. It's because we put tremendous effort into getting rid of them. This is one of the theories for why human body temperature seems to have lowered since the measurement was standardized at 37 C.
There was a poem written about the phenomenon:
Big fleas have little fleas
upon their backs to bite 'em
And little fleas have lesser fleas
and so ad infinitum
Written by de Morgan of de Morgan's Laws!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonaptera_(poem)
But he lifted the genius part of it from Jonathan Swift.
The version I recall has "upon their knees to bite 'em". Maybe my juvenile brain made up that internal rhyme the better to remember it.
We "met" a king penguin at Singapore Bird Paradise that would follow people around at the edge of the tank (an acrylic sheet separated you from their enclosure) and try to interact. It swam up to my wife and followed her around, then went to another bunch of people and did the same. It seemed to enjoy watching people watching it and waving to it. Not every animal does, but this one did.
I’m not sure if it applies with all birds, but many seem to become fixated on humans. This can happen if you care for very young, sick or injured birds. My wife cares for various sad cases and if she isn’t careful they stay with with us. We have 4 pigeons at the moment, with various issues. I call them our rehoming pigeons. Do you want a pigeon?
Funny enough, my late father was a veterinarian and we had a pigeon that we raised from a chick (we weren't sure what this thoroughly ugly bird was and it turned out it was a pigeon). It was very tame and lived in a hutch on the back porch, and would watch for us to come back from the electric pole out the front. Unfortunately its knowledge of cats was limited to our extremely lazy ones and one day it disappeared; we suspect it got eaten.
I became friends with a mallard while living near a pond, he would follow me when I walked to the bus stop, and greet me while on my way home (closer to home, he wouldn't typically leave the apartment complex, thankfully).
one year, he disappeared, which added a lot of sadness to my life. that summer, he reappeared and walked up a hill to greet me, with his mate and ducklings in tow. his mate had had a shattered (and repaired) beak, and was easy to pick out, and he spent time walking between us with "quack quack quack", back and forth, as if to introduce us. they stayed around at least until I moved a year or so later. by far the most profound experience I've had with a "wild" animal, a memorable experience that I will continue to cherish.
We treated a pigeon back to health from a failed cat attack - healthy enough to eat and walk, but not fly. It took a while but she eventually fully regained her ability to fly.
She had some rather distinct markings and would hang around the house pretty regularly after that. Then one day outside she was getting seriously groomed by a larger pigeon and wow is that where that term comes from?
Anyhow yeah she returned the grooming (which I'd later look up was her way of saying 'yeah I'm down - let's go') and I never saw her, or him, again.
So yeah - there could've been a happier ending there, especially because when a cat does eat a pigeon there tends to be evidence left.
An alternative last resort could have been to let small groups of real people in to see the sunfish during renovations. It could even be a PR thing with a lottery or something for the lucky sunfish companions.
These animals yearn for their mates.
I understand the conservation aspect of aquariums and all the good things that come out of it (research, etc) but it still makes me a bit sad when I read things like this.
I agree with you. The older I get, the less and less tolerant I become of the concept of zoos and aquariums.
The better ones take really good care of the animals within.
And I think they serve an important and not-irreplaceable purpose - exposure. They help show ordinary people, many of whom live in cities with no exposure to real nature, just what out there is worth protecting. I think it helps build public support for things like reducing waste, better fishing and hunting practices, the importance of parks and preserves, wildlife crossings, etc.
Sure, you can see them on your phone. But the result is completely different than seeing them with your own eyes.
I yearn for my mate… but do they yearn for me?
It's a fucking baby wheel man!!
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0IQCLQDfKw)
it's a fucking baby wheel man!!
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0IQCLQDfKw)
Any article about cardboard standees in japanese aquariums is incomplete without reference to Grape-kun, a penguin who fell in love with a cardboard cutout from an anime promotion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape-kun
ma hawt, ma soul
Is it loneliness, or stimulus deprivation? The tank looks barren in the photo.
They live in the middle of big oceans. Whenever I've found one in the wild, there is nothing nearby, so I imagine an empty tank is the best way to replicate that.
:(
I'm surprised to see so many comments solely about how aquariums/zoos are cruel and feeling sorry for this particular fish, when it's a species that is regularly hunted. I wouldn't want to be locked in a cage/tank either, but by ending up in a well run aquarium this sunfish is doing better than 99.999% of sunfish that have encountered humans.
This isn't a screed against eating fish or meat; I eat both. There are a lot of unethical practices in these industries that I'd like to see greatly improved, but putting a few individuals in an enclosure where there is at least some research and educational value seems like not even a rounding error on the state of animal welfare.
Being cared for by conscientious humans, providing enrichment and variety, can be better than living in the wild. For any animal, living in the wild, life span tends to be short, and life tends to be brutal. Prey animals are hunted, and they scrounge for food; finding a steady, reliable, nutritious, and tasty source of food in the wild is vanishingly rare. Dealing with parasites, illness, injury, predation, and all the other stress and constant threats to life is why wild animals are dangerous. Peaceful, fulfilling, life is incredibly rare.
It's even incredibly rare for humans - we're currently in an age of plenty and abundance, with more people living better lives than at any other point in the history of our species.
Overfishing and the geopolitical nature of enforcement and exploitation aren't something we can affect at an individual level, but these aquarium staff are doing a good thing, making a pretty good life for a sunfish. An actual companion would be better, but as long as the cutouts are triggering relief for whatever social needs being affected, that's a good deal for the sunfish.
I was commenting to my wife the other day... it seems to me that there are very few wild animals that just die from being too old. Not an expert, but it seems to me that most animals in the wild live until they are brutally ripped apart and eaten alive by another animal, and it's only a matter of time -- very rarely reaching an age old enough to just die.
Very few other animals put energy (either directly or through abstractions like "money", "welfare", and "centralized monopolies on the legitimate use of violence") into sustaining members of the species/group that can no longer defend and feed themselves.
Humans in the developed world do this so well that very few of them are even required to defend and feed themselves without these abstractions.
The interesting thing is predator and prey both die when they get too slow. Not sure which side has a worse ending there! Then there's disease or even a simple scratch getting infected.
The world's a brutal place, probably all worlds. Because the very nature of evolution means species that exploit the most thrive the most. The obvious exception of things like a solar feeding plant isn't even an exception. The great oxidation event caused one of the greatest mass extinctions on the planet - we evolved to thrive on oxygen but for most of the other life alive at the time it'd be like if plants today produced cyanide gas.
Predators tend to have a thinner margin.
Even a slight injury to a predator can mean a slow death by starvation.
That's why videogame predators are so ridiculous. They keep coming after you, even when half their ass is blown away. A real predator will bugger off, as soon as it figures out that there might be a cost to attacking you. That's a big reason that many herbivore defenses seem kind of ridiculous, but work. They just need to make the predator nervous. Unless the predator is starving, it's likely to seek prey elsewhere.
There's also tremendous competition between predators.
The issue is about whether the animal is forced to endure pain, not weather we eat it or not. The same is true for how we keep the animals we eat, and why people are rightfully upset about how some cows and chickens and the like are kept during their short lives before slaughter.
Essentially, having the animal be free before we catch and immediately and hopefully quickly kill it for food is fine. Keeping it in a zoo where it's not suffering is fine.
Keeping it in poor conditions before we kill and eat it is not fine. Keeping it in poor conditions in a zoo is not fine.
This story is interesting in that it gives insight into the mental state of these zoo animals, something that is often hard for the public to see and understand. It should make you pause to consider if we're really keeping these animals in humane conditions, given that apparently even fish have possibly more complex internal mental states than we assume.
Agree. There's a provocative word you don't mention: hypocrisy.
This has become my reflexive internal response when I hear complaining about small-beer animal cruelty. Why are we so quick to empathize with this sunfish, and so slow to do it for creatures whose products most of us eat every single day? The horror show of factory farming creates many orders of magnitude more suffering than all these little anecdotes put together.
Zoos are cruel? Hypocrisy. Circuses are cruel? Hypocrisy. Bullfighting is cruel? Hypocrisy. Euthanizing stray dogs is cruel? Hypocrisy. Using animals in a film shoot is cruel? Hypocrisy. Keeping a single guinea pig is cruel? Hypocrisy (but against the law in Germany). And so on.
People in developed countries have become very good at dealing with cognitive dissonance.
The internet in general finds the black in the rainbow, Hacker News is typically better in quality of argument as it tends to attract a more intellectual crowd, but the overall tendency is the same.
Additionally, most of us are taught "hurting things is bad" as children and many adults have a hard time reconciling that we have to intentionally hurt at least some living things to live, hurt an even greater amount of living things to flourish, and at a certain point decreasing suffering in one dimension increases it in another.
For those who haven't developed a more mature framework, they tend to revert to the childhood "hurting things is bad" lesson, and an alternative framework based on nuance and context around suffering is too emotionally painful for them to accept, even if they can intellectually admit to the logic.
> is typically better in quality of argument as it tends to attract a more intellectual crowd
On behalf of the more intellectual crowd, I'm obliged to devastatingly elucidate that we're (quite singularly) more intrinsically adept at forcefully projecting ex post facto rationalizations upon our--invariably and universally--emotional decision-making processes whilst obfuscating the same under an avalanche of loquacious hifalutinisms.
Poor fish
I wish I was that sunfish.
Want me to print you some friends? :)
You wish you were in prison?
Zoos are really quite cruel.
Most zoos nowadays are important research centers.
Besides that, they have an important educational component that surely contributes politically for conservation efforts.
Big Zoos, yes. And they do some great research, as well as preservation and rehabilitation. But I've also been to a few small zoos in rural America that are essentially someone's private animal collection that they charge you a fee to see. I think those are less common than they used to be, but they do exist.
False dichotomy. If we wanted to, we could do both preservation and not lock them up.
Zoos are a lesser evil argument, locally they are not the best for the animals but they provide globally long-term benefits for humans and nature as well.
The implication here is that it would be impossible to fund conservation without zoos. As a counter argument: we could just do it. Increase taxes by the amount people spend in zoos and spend that on conservation. The only argument in favour of the zoo over that other approach is that people want to look at animals in cages.
> As a counter argument: we could just do it. Increase taxes by the amount people spend in zoos and spend that on conservation.
Why do you think we could do that?
I say we could just increase taxes by $5,000 per person per year and spend it on breeding and releasing mosquitoes in Los Angeles.
What’s the alternative? The implied greater evil?
A world with no zoos and less appreciation and consideration for nature as well as the long term necessity of caring for it?
I’m wondering about creating more nature parks instead of zoos. Of course not as accessible for people in cities, but could be a much better compromise.
In general, we should avoid putting animals in small cages as much as possible.
Speaking of nature parks instead of zoos, the San Diego Wild Safari Park is just that. Very large enclosed pastures with multiple species living alongside each other.