‘Harbinger of Doom’ Oarfish Found Floating Off California Coast Two Days Before Earthquake Struck

  • last month
A massive fish known as the “harbinger of doom” was found sulking off the coast of California last weekend — marking yet another end-of-the-world forewarning in recent weeks.

To make matters worse, the mystical fish was dead.

The 12-foot oarfish carcass — which is rumored to be a sign of impending earthquakes — was spotted by kayakers and snorkelers exploring San Diego’s La Jolla Cove.

The “doomsday fish” delivered on its promise — a 4.6 earthquake rattled Los Angeles just two days after its discovery.

Seemingly unafraid of its bad luck, however, the crew cuddled up next to the fish’s body and smiled in pictures with it before reporting their findings to UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Officials are performing a necropsy to determine what killed the juvenile oarfish and sent its body into shallow waters.

Oarfish are deep-sea dwellers and are rarely seen by humans. Even their bodies rarely float into shallow waters, making last week’s discovery extremely rare.

Only 20 oarfish have washed up in the entire state since 1901, the oceanography center said.

They are “strikingly large, odd-looking fish” with a long, silvery, ribbon-shaped body that can grow to be 30 feet long, according to the Ocean Conservatory.

They also have creepy large eyes and “foreboding red spines that stick out to form a crown-like cluster.”

Although bone-chilling enough on its own, the doomsday fish’s visit to California is just the latest in a series of bad omens that struck this summer.

Last week, Utah’s Double Arch — a 190 million-year-old geological structure — spontaneously crumbled.

Two weeks earlier, a 1,100-year-old pyramid in Mexico buckled under intense rain, which descendants of the Purépecha peoples who built it warned was a “bad omen” of impending doom.

Category

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Animals
Transcript
00:00A massive fish known as the harbinger of doom was found sulking off the coast of California
00:11last weekend, marking yet another end of the world for warning in recent weeks.
00:16To make matters worse, the mystical fish was dead.
00:20The 12-foot oarfish carcass, which is rumored to be a sign of impending earthquakes, was
00:24spotted by kayakers and snorkelers exploring San Diego's La Jolla Cove.
00:29The doomsday fish delivered on its promise a 4.6 earthquake rattled Los Angeles just
00:33two days after its discovery.
00:36Seemingly unafraid of its bad luck, however, the crew cuddled up next to the fish's body
00:40and smiled in pictures with it before reporting their findings to UC San Diego's Scripps
00:44Institution of Oceanography.
00:47They are strikingly large, odd-looking fish, with a long, silvery, ribbon-shaped body that
00:52can grow to be 30 feet long, according to the Ocean Conservatory.
00:56They also have creepy large eyes and foreboding red spines that stick out to form a crown-like
01:00cluster.
01:02Two weeks earlier, a 1,100-year-old pyramid in Mexico buckled under intense rain, which
01:07descendants of the Puripeca peoples who built it warned was a bad omen of impending doom.

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