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A group of beachgoers made a rare sighting when they found an oarfish swimming alongside a beach in Mexico.
The water animal, known as a “doomsday fish,” was spotted at Playa El Quemado in Baja California Sur on Sunday, Feb. 9, per Men’s Journal.
Video captured by Robert Hayes and obtained by PEOPLE shows the long and bright-colored fish flailing in the water.
“That’s an oarfish. Holy s—, they’ve almost never been seen live,” one man is heard saying in the clip.
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“Nobody’s gonna believe this,” the man is heard saying as one of the beachgoers approaches the oarfish to take pictures with it. “The first one I saw was 24 feet long. They’ve been found up to 30 feet.”
Hayes told Storyful that the oarfish “swam straight at us, lifting its head above the water about two inches.”
“We redirected it three times out to the water, but it came back each time,” he said, noting that the beachgoer holding the oarfish in the clip assumed the fish might be injured and planned to take it to a marine biologist.
His intuition may not have been off, as the Ocean Conservancy states on its website that it is unusual for humans to encounter oarfish, as they primarily reside in the deep sea.
“If one is spotted close to the surface, it typically indicates that the creature is sick, dying or at least disoriented,” the organization said.
According to the conservancy, the oarfish is known as the “doomsday fish” as legend states that spotting one may be “a warning sign from higher powers that disasters such as earthquakes are soon to occur.”
In 2011, 20 oarfish appeared on Japanese beaches months before the country experienced its most devastating earthquake on record. More recently, a 4.4-magnitude earthquake occurred in Los Angeles in August 2024, two days after another oarfish sighting.
Ben Frable, manager of the Scripps Oceanography Marine Vertebrate Collection, also notes that oarfish washing ashore “may have to do with changes in ocean conditions and increased numbers of oarfish off our coast.”
“Many researchers have suggested this as to why deep-water fish strand on beaches. Sometimes it may be linked to broader shifts such as the El Niño and La Niña cycle, but this is not always the case,” he said in a previous statement.
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Last fall, an oarfish washed up dead on a beach in Encinitas in Southern California in November and another was found by a group exploring La Jolla Cove near San Diego in August.
