Something very bizarre showed up on Ryan’s Shore earlier this year. Maybe it was lockdown fever or something!

My cousin, and neighbour, Maria O Leary was out walking on the strand when she came upon what seemed to be a fish – and she kindly sent me a photo and a video. I toddled down before work to view it, and lo and behold it was even more perplexing in the flesh.

It was certainly a fish, long, but flat and thin. It was also headless. Frustratingly, I would think it had only happened that morning, and I was kicking myself for walking over the Minaun rather than along the shore. As the tide was ebbing, I imagined that either it was swimming very close to shore or had died and been left aground on the lowering tide. Either way, I would think it was the pair of foxes that are roaming the strand at present who happened on it. I’d say they took the head away and you can see where the belly had been ripped open and some other bite marks too.

But it was an amazing-looking fish, and I had never seen anything like it before. I sent some photos to Denise O’Meara of SETU via Twitter and also to Declan Quigley by email and they suggested I take a sample to be analysed. The only issue was that we were in lockdown, so I was advised to put it into the freezer and drop it to SETU when conditions allowed.

The mystery fish – 15th April 2020 06.48 am located between the Point Light and the Half Tide Rock

Anyway, just recently Denise emailed an update, and it’s a wow – A confirmed sighting of an oarfish. Hopefully it is a first in Ireland. Here’s that recent email –

My PhD student, Thomas Curran (cc’d here) just finished analysing the unusual fish that washed up in Cheekpoint over the lockdown. He usually works on mosquitoes, so he was delighted with this! We used an analysis that is used for DNA barcoding (often used for commercial fish species identification) and we got almost a 100% identity to Regalecus glesne or the giant oarfish. The sequencing worked beautifully and I am confident that the analysis is correct.

I had a quick look to see what is out there in terms of DNA sequences published from other areas around the world using the same DNA region and there were some sequences available from the Yucatán Peninsula. The Cheekpoint sample was genetically very similar to one of those. Unfortunately, there isn’t much other data available on the oarfish, but I thought that was very interesting in itself. I have included a genetic tree that shows the Cheekpoint sample on a branch shared with one of the Yucatán samples. I suspect there isn’t much genetic variation across their distribution, but the samples from within the Yucatán had some variation and to say that the Cheekpoint sample was the same as one of those is quite interesting. I think this is possibly a new record for Ireland, but Declan might be able to confirm that for us.

I took this photo at 15.40 (after work) on the same day – already the colour is fading and it had been dragged further aliong the strand and there were more bite marks and damage to it.

By Georges Cuvier – Planche N°69 du livre “Le règne animal distribué d’après son organisation”, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26131322