Pelagic fishes - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 272

the Bay with a current of warm water, then get caught when the tem-
perature takes a sudden drop.
The first step of our mola research was to figure out how to catch
and transport one. Feeding as they do on jellies, it seemed impractical
to try and catch one on a line. (How would we get the jellyfish on the
hook to begin with?) Molas are, however, often easy to approach by
boat; once I'd even caught one by just leaping o¤ a boat into the water
and grabbing it. Although I didn't think that would be practical for
our purposes either, it did mean the fish might be easy to scoop up in
a net from the bow of a boat.
Finally we heard reports that molas had been spotted in the Bay, and
our collectors prepared to go looking for them. Their dorsal fin can
often be spotted at the surface. At first glance you might think it's a
shark fin, but the shape and the characteristic back-and-forth sculling
motion is quite di¤erent from the straight-line motion of the fin of a
cruising shark.
One calm, flat morning, a fin was spotted, and the scooping method
from the front of the boat worked. (The collectors learned they had
to be quick, though, before the mola woke up from its reverie and took
o¤ when it realized a boat was bearing down on it.) Once caught, the
mola was transferred to the small holding tank on the boat, brought
to the aquarium, and released directly into the Monterey Bay Habi-
tats exhibit. It looked great as it cruised slowly around the tank, and
the visitors responded immediately to this strange new addition, cer-
tainly the most eye-catching of all the creatures in the exhibit.
Our next problem was to figure out how to get food to it in a tank
full of other hungry fish. We knew molas eat jellies in the wild, but we
also knew that providing them with a year-round supply of those an-
imals would be impossible. Our hope was that we could switch the
mola over to some other type of nutritious food that we could provide
every day. For the moment, however, Freya Sommer o¤ered some of
her extra moon jellies as mola food. A few were released into the tank,
and the mola almost immediately started to suck them up.
Until now Freya hadn't shown much interest in fishes, being fasci-
nated instead by the diverse anatomy and life strategies of the so-called
lower animals, the invertebrates. Perhaps she thought fish were mere