A Collection of Animal Essays

The link to the complete essay is below, and there should be no charge for reading any of the essays.

 Mola Mola

Something was moving in the water, possibly a plastic bag or a chunk of surfboard the size of an oval serving paper.  I stopped looking for little green shore crabs and watched what might have been a bag or even a flattened milk jug lolling just past where the little waves crash open and run up on the rocks. Then a fin came flopping out, barely breaking the surface, and the fin seemed to be about the size of a large human foot.  So not a grocery bag, but something alive.  Because it didn’t surface I knew it wasn’t a duck.

For several minutes the fish rolled back and forth, flashing a fin here and there and seemed to be floating sideways most of the time.  One of guides at the kayak dock said it was a sunfish, a.k.a. a mola mola.  He said people mistake the mola mola for sharks sometimes because of those grayish-white fins and sides.

I didn’t think it looked like a shark, I thought it was some kind of disoriented flounder.  But flounder (or fluke) are Atlantic seaboard fish that look and act like little sandy bathroom carpets.  Fluke don’t cavort on the surface and if you manage to catch one and pull it up, it’s like catching half a ream of very active paper.  Mola mola (this one, anyway) seemed much thicker and more calm, which isn’t fair to the fluke, as the one I remember had a hook poking through its mouth and we couldn’t wait to eat it.