There’s a new heavyweight fish in the world, and it has beaten the previous record by over 1,000 pounds.
Fishermen along the coast of Portugal netted a giant sunfish that weighs 6,049 pounds, which is good enough for the world record for the heaviest bony fish. The fish was almost 12-feet long. José Nuno Gomes-Pereira of Portugal’s Atlantic Naturalist Association led the search off Horta Harbor in the Azores archipelago.
The previous record holder, also a giant sun fish, was almost 9-feet long and was found outside Japan. That monster fish weighed 5,070 pounds.
The Journal of Fish Biology confirmed the new champion:
The M. alexandrini reported here is the heaviest extant teleost specimen reported to date,” the magazine said in a statement. “It exceeds by nearly half a ton (444 kg [979 pounds]) the largest previously known specimen (2300 kg [5,070 pounds]), caught off Kamogawa, Japan in 1996… Giant sunfishes M. alexandrini can thus reach more than twice the maximum weight of its congeneric, the ocean sunfish M. mola (heaviest record 1320 kg [2,910 pounds]).
As Bro Bible noted, “scientists aren’t certain how the new record holder for the world’s heaviest bony fish was killed, but a large semi-cylindrical depression near its head with signs of red paint led them to speculate that it was hit by the keel of a boat.”
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