Welcome Back to Bizarre Beast: Season Zero. Thank you for coming with us on this year-long journey to remaster the episodes of Bizarre Beast that were originally created for VlogBrothers. For our final Season Zero episode, the giant fish that loves to sun, the Mola Mola.
This episode’s pin is designed by Alison Dubois. You can learn more about her and her work here: https://www.alison-dubois.com/
Get the Season Zero and Season One pin sets here: http://bizarrebeastsshow.com/
Get the 2025 Complexly calendar here: https://complexly.store/products/2025-complexly-calendar
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#BizarreBeasts #molamola
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Sources:
https://sunfishresearch.wordpress.com/tag/diet/
https://seaturtlespacecoast.org/what-do-sea-turtles-eat/
https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/animals-a-to-z/ocean-sunfish
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/worlds-biggest-bony-fish-discovered
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/4192566.stm
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-02103-6
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/unraveling-the-mysteries-of-the-ocean-sunfish-115258763/
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/heaviest-bony-fish
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/facts/ocean-sunfish
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/sunfish
https://www.fishbase.se/identification/SpeciesList.php?genus=Mola
https://oceansunfish.org/species-and-distribution/
https://www.britannica.com/animal/mola-fish-family
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10228-017-0603-6
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Images:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wVkiyLdEk6TpwIeX1HfsHX_a2YkSs7OAqZwWj-ms2IY/edit?usp=sharing
Good morning, John. Welcome to the last episode of Bizarre Beasts: Season Zero, which is also, kind of the first episode of Bizarre Beasts. This is the end of our year-long journey to remaster the original Bizarre Beasts
00:12:episodes from vlogbrothers with corrections, updates, and new facts about these beasts. I don't get anything wrong ever. What do you mean, "corrections?" It's been so hard for us to find things to fix. Terribly hard. I appriciate that.
00:25:Also, make sure you stick around to the end of the episode for the pin set announcement. I'm super stressed out and not really able to concentrate on anything in particular. The nice thing, though, is that now I'm old, so I understand that this is happening and I know the solution:
01:38:very weird animals! When you need to make a lot of videos on YouTube, like I do, you start to come up with ideas for, like, formats and I started to realize that animals are very weird! And so I started to, every once in a while, just, like, make a cool animal video
01:52:and then I decided, "what if this was, like, a thing?" So let's start out with one of my faves: the mola mola, or the ocean sunfish. I love this fish so much! Various species of sunfish are successful and you know how I know that?
01:12:Because they were doing just fine before we started accidentally ripping them out of the ocean with the rest of our fish catch and throwing a bunch of indigestible trash that looks exactly like their favorite food into the ocean.
01:21:Yeah, 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 a mola mola on its side, it kinda has a very similar swimming style to a sea turtle.
02:35:Almost as if there's a good reason for this ridiculous shape, and yes, I recognize that they look dumb! But not real convergent evolution. It’s just kinda how you swim if you’re shaped like a fat pancake with flippers or fins and no tail. They are the biggest of the bony fishes and they get very,
02:54:very big, up to about a thousand kilograms. Okay, I need to clarify this a little bit. To be more precise, sunfish are the heaviest of the bony fishes. And it’s one of the other species of sunfish, Mola alexandrini – the bump-headed sunfish,
02:09:that’s the real Guinness World Record-holder for heaviest bony fish. A dead individual found off the Azores in December of 2021 weighed 2,744 kilograms [6,049 lbs]! For a fish of their size, they also have relatively small mouths,
02:24:which they can’t close all the way, due to their teeth being fused into something like a beak. And they don’t use those beak-like tooth-plates to chew, either. Instead, they suck in and spit back out the jellies they feed on until they break up into gooey chunks the sunfish can gulp down.
03:40:And they have curved nightmare-teeth in their throats, called ‘pharyngeal teeth' that help shred the jelly chunks even more on their way to the sunfish’s stomach. Up until recently, we actually assumed from their lack of swim bladders and their very
03:55:weird fins that they were themselves a kind of plankton, that they would just go wherever the ocean currents would take them, 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
03:09:out of the water and into a boat! Now we could not confirm whether this was 100% true – theoretically, someone out there could’ve thrown out their back or pulled a muscle or something trying to reel one in. But we did find a BBC News article from 2005 that said
03:24:“only one man has ever been killed by a sunfish – and that was because it landed on him and squashed him.” But that's when they're relatively young. When they're less young, they are not very fast, they're pretty slow, but because they don't need to be fast, because they're so big
04:39:and they have a fecundity proportionate to their size. A female adult sunfish can lay up to 300... ...wait for it... ...million eggs. For clarity, that is more than the entire world population of adult sunfish. There are currently three recognized species of sunfish in the genus Mola:
04:54:Mola mola – the ocean sunfish or common mola; Mola alexandrini – the bump-headed sunfish or giant sunfish; and Mola tecta – the hoodwinker sunfish. The ocean sunfish is found worldwide, in temperate and tropical oceans, as is the bump-headed sunfish.
04:11:And the hoodwinker sunfish, which was only discovered in 2017, is found in temperate parts of the Southern Hemisphere and occasionally off the coast of California. Sunfish are called sunfish because they sun themselves. They lay flat on the water, either to warm themselves up so that they
04:27: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 kinda look like suns with, you know, like a super gross eyeball inside of them. And they grow extremely fast!
05:44:The Monterey Bay Aquarium had a sunfish for 15 months that grew from 50lbs to almost 900lbs. It was so big they couldn't fit it in the tank anymore, so they had to airlift it by helicopter to freedom. From birth to adulthood, Mola mola increase in mass by more than 60 million times,
05:03: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 Mola mola have their big, terrified eyes locked into a bumpy head and can't fully close their mouths
05:13:and have huge amounts of parasites both in and around them, but we have no idea what's going on in that big dopey headbody 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. The Season Zero pin set is now available!
05:28:This set includes all 12 of the original animals we began this Bizarre Beasts journey with on Vlogbrothers, plus the Mola Mola that we just made for this set! Mola Mola, we are so sorry that we kept you pin-less for so long! Hopefully, we’re making it up to you.
06:43:And since this is the last Season Zero episode, we are now making the Mola mola pin available on its own. Everybody needs more mola molas in their life! To get the Season Zero Pin set and the Mola Mola pins, just go to bizarrebeastsshow.com! And thank you for coming on this journey with us!
06:00:And also you can keep watching for new Bizarre Beasts every month! We are so excited to announce that Complexly is making a 2025 wall calendar! And this year all of our shows contributed to one calendar.
06:11:For 2025, the folks behind SciShow, Crash Course, Eons, Study Hall, and of course, Bizarre Beasts, decided to celebrate the social progress, technological advancements, and mind-blowing discoveries achieved in the past twenty five years.
06:25:For the Bizarre Beasts section, we wanted to highlight that we've recently found out everything from some chameleons to platypuses and pumpkin toadlets actually glow under UV. Each month of this Complexly Calendar features an incredible illustration by Emily Alvarez,
07:39:the artist who designed the Bizarre Beasts sea slugs, and a paragraph about the topic. Get ready for 2025, and be sure to get your 2025 Complexly calendar now at complexly.store/calendar.
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