One morning a week, Stefan Kiesbye makes the drive from his home in Santa Rosa to one of the beaches around Bodega Bay, to pick up trash.
After dropping his wife at an airport shuttle early Sunday morning, Kiesbye headed out to Doran Regional Park in Bodega Bay. Arriving an hour before sunrise, he was greeted by a chorus of sea lions barking from the end of the jetty.
At the westernmost tip of the beach, some 50 feet above the waterline, he spied a large creature out of the corner of his eye. In recent years, Kiesbye has encountered several deceased sea lions at Doran. But this was a different animal: a stranded fish, oval in shape, roughly 6 feet long and 3 feet across.
Kiesbye, a novelist and English professor at Sonoma State University, wasn’t sure what he was seeing. This strange fish, its small mouth far out of proportion with the rest of its body, had neither a tail, so far as he could tell, nor “back fin.”
He was looking at the body of a hoodwinker sunfish, or Mola tecta – derived from the Latin word tectus, meaning hidden – a species whose existence has only been known since 2017. That’s when it was first described by a group of researchers led by Marianne Nyegaard of New Zealand.
After snapping some pictures, Kiesbye returned to the task at hand, collecting refuse — beer cans, plastic bottles and discarded beach toys, for the most part. Upon returning home, he Googled “big weird fish around here.”
He found a 2019 CNN story about an extremely rare sunfish that had washed in with the tides at UC Santa Barbara’s Coal Oil Point Reserve.
That fish, the first hoodwinker to be observed north of the equator, bore an uncanny resemblance to the sunfish he’d just photographed.
In stepped Nyegaard, the Kiwi scientist.
After reviewing photos emailed by the Press Democrat on Sunday, Nyegaard, who is based in Auckland, confirmed that the Doran Beach sunfish was, in fact, a hoodwinker.
Unlike more common species of sunfish, Mola mola, the body of the Doran Beach specimen lacks a protruding snout, she pointed out. Moreover, “the clavus is quite narrow and there is no head bump or chin bump.”
The Mola tecta observed by Kiesbye, she noted, is almost certainly the same deceased fish photographed and posted by several others in recent days on the website iNaturalist, a community science platform for sharing observations of plants and animals.
Nyegaard and her colleagues believed, at first, that Mola tecta’s range was limited to the Southern Hemisphere. Since that 2019 Santa Barbara sighting, however, at least a half dozen other hoodwinkers have washed ashore on beaches from Southern California to Oregon, and up to Alaska.
That’s come as a surprise to the scientists.
“We know Mola tecta occurs in the Humboldt Current off South America, as far north as Peru,” she said, “but we did not think they would cross the warm equatorial belt — at least not very often. But they definitely cross — probably by diving deep and swimming underneath the warmer equatorial surface waters.”
According to staff members at Doran Regional Park, several sunfish were seen offshore shortly before the hoodwinker became stranded on the beach last week, said Meda Freeman, a spokesperson for Sonoma County Regional Parks. One Doran ranger reported this was the second dead sunfish he’s seen in his six years of working on the coast.
According to Nyegaard, it’s not uncommon for sunfish “all over the world” to “strand” – that is, to become beached or stuck on land, unable to return to the water on their own.
“As far as I can tell it is not necessarily a sign of human influence.”
Kiesbye was “still in awe” Sunday morning, hours after encountering the hoodwinker.
“It’s sad that it’s been washed to shore,” he said. “But it was so enormous and so weird and gorgeous. It’s like suddenly you’re on another planet.”