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Mola Mola

Ocean Sunfish

Photo by ClaraTeo
Published on Project Noah
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Field Notes

Description:

A large bony fish, belonging to the family of Tetraodontiformes, which also includes pufferfish, porcupinefish and filefish. They spend a large portion of their lives submerged at depths greater than 200m and surface to swallower depth to get themselves cleaned between June to September around Nusa Penida, Bali.

Habitat:

Temperate and tropical waters between the Atlantic and Pacific.

Notes:

Photo by Allan Tan (Projekts).

Species ID Suggestions

Comments (7)
KarenSaxton
Before I was doing project noah and carrying my cam around everywhere, one washed up at Sunset Beach, in Southern Oregon.
ChrisP
We met up with one at 45m off Nusa Penida on the drop off!...as you say the moment is indescribable!!
ClaraTeo
The moment with the mola was indescribable. We literally froze when we saw them and our reg nearly fell out of our mouth! Bali is a good place to see them. There's frequent sighting from Jun to Sep. Btw, the photos where shot on Canon S95 (awesome point & shoot).
Palaimon
AMAZING!!! The first picture is really WOW!!! I never meet a mola mola, all the time a was on wrong diveplaces :-) Very good shoot again the surface and withe the other diver. What kind of equipment do you use?
LauraMaria
Oh WOW, one of the organisms on my wishlist for diving! Must have been a magical moment. Lovely spotting. By the way, you have the common and scientific name the wrong way round haha, Oceanic Sunfish should be in the Common Name field, and Mola mola in the scientific name field :)

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Photographed
PublishedOctober 25, 2011

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