Sunfish have always made splash here on the Long Beach Peninsula whenever they have been occasionally sighted over the decades. Cape Disappointment State Park Interpretive Specialist June Mohler provides a sense of scale for the large specimen that washed up last week.

ILWACO, Wash. — A massive fish rarely seen on Washington’s beaches washed up at Cape Disappointment State Park’s Waikiki Beach Aug. 28.

Interpretive rangers estimate the sunfish, or mola, weighs close to 300 pounds. It is approximately 7-feet long from fin to tip.

Sunfish can be found in oceans around the world, but they prefer warmer waters, said Rachel Morris, interpretive assistant at the state park. Rangers don’t know how or why this particular sunfish landed at Waikiki Beach.

Sunfish feed on fish, algae and zooplankton, but love jellyfish. That love can kill them though. They’ve been known to suffocate on trash, mistaking things like plastic bags for tasty jellyfish. They also frequently snag in drift gillnets.

Still, it is very rare to have one wash up here, Morris said.

Sunfish are the world’s largest bony fish. They can weigh up to 5,000 pounds and average 11 feet from tip to tip when grown. Some sunfish have been measured at as much as 14 feet.

Even though this sunfish is relatively small, it’s still a big enough.

“You don’t understand how big it is from pictures alone,” Morris said.

In one photo rangers took, Interpretive Assistant June Mohler poses behind the fish with her arms stretched out from her sides pointing toward the fish’s beak mouth and back toward its back fin. Her arms can’t span the length of the silver-colored fish. A blue ball-point pen in the foreground, placed give a sense of scale, is minuscule next to the fish’s belly. The sunfish, on its side in the sand looks like a cross between a shell-less sea turtle and a pancake. It looks fake, like something a child might dream up and scrawl on a piece of paper with crayons.

In the water, sunfish appear perpetually surprised. Their mouths never quite close and their huge round eyes stare as they glide past divers. Sometimes, they leap suddenly out of the water to shake off skin parasites.

When large marine mammals are stranded or wash up dead on beaches, they are reported and rescued (if possible) or removed. A young gray whale that washed up in Long Beach earlier this year was buried. But sunfish don’t trigger the same sort of concerns, especially ones that are already dead. The Seaside Aquarium wasn’t interested when the rangers called, Morris said.

She, however, planned to make use of the sunfish during an evening interpretive program at the beach Aug. 29. The sunfish hadn’t begun to stink and would make for a good talking point and prop, she said.

‘You don’t understand how big it is from pictures alone.’

— Rachel Morris

interpretive assistant at Cape Disappointment State Park