oh awesome an excuse to address this shitheap of a post because for some reason people on here have decided to make it a personality trait to shit on a really unique, beautiful, and endangered family of aquatic life. i’ll try not to let my hatred boil over into my response too much
1. sunfish are capable of feeling pain. i have no idea where anyone has gotten this idea besides anthro-centrism but yeah. they can’t close their mouths or scream, so i guess a lack of visible human-relatable pain response means its not possible for them to feel it. sure. to this day it is debated whether or not human fucking babies can feel pain, and until as recently as the 1980′s it was assumed that they couldn’t.
2. sunfish are opportunistic predators. recent dna analysis has confirmed that sunfish’s diets only comprise of around 15% jellyfish and salps. the rest is small fish, crustaceans, and squids. all of which do not stand still and allow themselves to be eaten, meaning that the sunfish needs to be a fairly capable predator in order to gain the over 600 pounds expected in an average adult sunfish’s first year of life.
here are several videos showcasing the range of movement, control, and speed that sunfish possess. it’s incredibly impressive considering, again, an adult can weigh anywhere from 600-900 pounds, and their main form of propulsion is their two rudder-like fins, with barely any aerodynamic assistance to speak of.
3. sunfish have complicated and intimate relationships with cleaner reefs that truly showcase their intelligence. sunfish will regularly seek out known cleaning reefs to have parasites removed, and the widely recognized behavior of floating to the ocean’s surface is hypothesized to serve this purpose further, employing sea birds to remove parasites over open water where reefs aren’t available.
here are videos of this behavior in action, showing some serious depth to the inner world and autonomy of the sunfish
4. sunfish are not plankton. i don’t know where this constant misinfo comes from. they’re the world’s largest bony fish.
5. for another record-breaker, yes, sunfish lay the most eggs of any known vertebrate, with around 300,000,000 eggs produced by one individual, fertilized externally via ocean currents. however, a truly impressive number of these individuals meet seemingly impossible energy requirements in their natural cycle each and every day, enough to feed the up to and over 600 pounds of growth within a single year that this species and its close cousins (including the southern sunfish, the sharptail mola, and the hoodwinker sunfish) must meet to survive. those that don’t survive this grueling ecological filter also serve an important purpose, becoming vital food for other growing species and larger filter feeders alike. it’s truly an example of the beauty of nature’s cycles on the largest possible scale.
in a kind of conclusion, it’s clear to me and everyone with any knowledge of them that sunfish are biologically beautiful creatures. but culturally, island nations such as korea and japan also have a fondness for them, with people citing their charming appearance and behavior, as well as their massive size, as reasons to love them. thanks to this, they appear in art, tv shows, movies, and video games quite often. my personal favorite depiction is probably kine, from the kirby series
i guess lastly, i’m really unsure as to why, and honestly kind of disturbed, that the sunfish has gotten such a bad reputation on this website. i don’t know how anyone could bring themselves to dislike, much less hate, such a harmless, interesting, and endangered family of animals. especially now, of all times, when we are essentially forced to watch the planet boil in front of our very eyes due to the greed and avarice of those at the top.
it’s hard not to become a little sad when people fail to see the beauty in the unique life around us, when we and our children don’t have much time left to do so.
vaporwave
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ellievsbear
amandla
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