Okay, this is probably fine! Nobody panic! IT'S PROBABLY FINE. *sobs*
Two so-called "doomsday" fish, the mysterious deep-sea oarfish, beached themselves at the same time in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, last month in what has come to be regarded as a warning and bad omen for millennia.
The oarfish typically lives about 3,000 feet below the ocean and are rarely seen at the surface, let alone on the beach.
The video, originally taken by Instagrammer @monicaandco_, shows beachgoers encountering the giant fish, which have long, shimmery, silver bodies and can grow to be more than 30 feet long.
The fish can be seen wriggling on the sand in a way that would be majestically beautiful if, you know, not for the whole "doomsday" thing.
In any case, beachgoers quickly got to work trying to help the fish back in the Pacific. But online, people were far more focused on the "doomsday" part.
Especially the fact that TWO of them showed up at once. If the legend holds, that can't be good.
Their reputation as ill omens stems mainly from Japanese folklore, where the fish have been depicted for ages as a sort of monster with a human face.
They lore has it that the fish only show themselves to humans before disasters like earthquakes, leading to their reputation as harbingers of doom.
That said, scientists have never found any real correlation between disasters and the oarfish's comings and goings, for what that's worth.
But that did little to quell the anxiety their unexpected appearance sparked in people on social media.
Though of course, this being the internet, not everyone took it seriously. There were plenty of doomsday fish jokes to lighten the doom too!
Harbinger of disaster, perhaps. But many others had a more obvious, and possibly more likely fear: that their habitat has become unstable or unlivable and they got beached while trying to seek a new place to live.
Global ocean temperatures have been rising for quite some time, affecting all sorts of habitats. However, because oarfish live so deep in the ocean, they are difficult to study, so what exactly causes them to beach can't be definitively known.
All the more reason to panic! The end is obviously here!
















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