Oarfish: the largest fish in the deep oceans

The BBC posted a pretty neat video about a rare giant deep sea fish called an ‘oarfish’ in the Gulf of Mexico. The footage is pretty neat as it’s one of the first times an oarfish has been filmed in the deep – most tend to wash up half dead or dying on shorelines (BBC don’t allow embedded footage, so click on image above to follow through to their site).

To be honest, I figured the video was a little underwhelming (these things are supposed to be 17m long and giants of the sea, right?) so I followed through to a Google search and came across these unbelievable photographs taken in Buena Vista, Mexico a few years back:

Here’s an even bigger one (23 foot) that washed up off a US Navy base in California back in ’96:

and one more from Baja California: