good morning John VidCon is next week so
I'm super stressed out and not really
able to concentrate on anything in
particular nice thing though is that now
I'm old and so I understand that this is
happening and I know the solution very
weird animals
luckily the Internet is almost as good
at sharing weird animals as it is at
sharing celebrity drama and reality
destroying rage lies I realize this
recently while on Twitter and seeing
this very good water anole it looks
silvery because it has a thin bubble
that clings to its super hydrophobic
skin that bubble has oxygen diffusing
into it and then it exhales into the
bubble and inhales newly oxygenated air
thus allowing it to stay underwater for
more than 15 minutes so John I'm gonna
start every once in a while sharing with
you a bizarre beast of some sort to ease
my own mind and maybe make us all feel
better about our lives on this beautiful
danger ball so let's start out with what
about faves the mola mola or the ocean
sunfish I love this fish so much
you may recognize them from this video
that thing is big J what is that thing
it looks right for this video game or
from a viral tumblr rant that I read
from some philistine claiming this thing
is so worthless it doesn't realize it
shouldn't exist you that's not how
this work the various species of sunfish
are successful and you know how I know
that because they were doing just fine
before we started accidentally ripping
them out of the ocean with the rest of
our fish cat and throwing a bunch of
indigestible trash that looks exactly
like their favorite food into the ocean
they eat jellyfish which is also the
favorite food of a lot of sea turtles
which made me think if there's some
convergent evolution going on here
because when you turn them all them all
on its side it kind of has a very
similar swimming style to a sea turtle
almost as if there's a good reason for
this ridiculous shape and yes I
recognize that they look dumb in Taiwan
they called them the fish that looks
like a toppled car and the Polish name
for them is basically just a head which
I yeah I see it but just because it
looks funny doesn't mean it's not a good
fish broth they are the biggest of the
bony fishes and they get very very big
up to about a thousand kilograms up
until recently we actually assumed from
their lack of
swim bladders and they're very weird
fins that they were themselves a kind of
plankton that they would just go
wherever the ocean currents would take
except it turns out they can actually
swim pretty fast in fact the only people
who have ever been hurt by sunfish were
hurt when sunfish jumped out of the
water and into a boat but that's when
they're relatively young when they're
less young they are not very fat they're
pretty slow but because they don't need
to be fast because they're so big and
they have fecundity proportionate to
their size a female adult sunfish can
lay up to 300 weight for it million eggs
for clarity that is more than the entire
world population of adult sunfish
sunfish are called sunfish because they
Sun themselves they lay flat on the
water either to warm themselves up so
that they can go back down deep and get
cold again or because they want seagulls
to come and peck worms off their side
maybe both maybe neither but weirdly
baby sunfish also kind of look like sons
with you know like a super gross eyeball
inside of them and they grow extremely
fast the Monterey Bay Aquarium had a
sunfish for 15 months that grew from 50
pounds to almost 900 pounds it was so
big that couldn't fit it in the tank
anymore so they had to airlift it by
helicopter to freedom birth to adulthood
mola mola increase in mass by more than
60 million times and John their
skeletons look like very dangerous
spaceships yeah I get it other animals
are cute and fuzzy and they look like
they're smiling at you and mullah bowl I
have their big terrified eyes locked
into a bumpy head and can't fully close
their mouths and have huge amounts of
parasites both in and around them but we
have no idea what's going on in that big
dopey head body and I just want all of
the mola mola in the world to know I
love you you're doing great keep being
lumpy and magnificent John I'll see you
on Tuesday