Giant ‘doom’ fish stuns divers

There’s plenty more fish in the sea, but probably not of this size. This enormous Russell’s oarfish (that’s the name of the species, it doesn’t belong to someone named Russell) was spotted looking big and weird off the coast of Taiwan, and full of holes. The holes were likely caused by a shark attack, but we dread to think of the size of the shark that could take a bite out of the 2m long oarfish (that’s the size of football fields). Russell’s oarfish is known as the ‘harbinger of doom,’ appearing only rarely, often before major natural disasters. Many of the fish were seen in the run-up to the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011, while this one was merely sighted in the wake of Janet Yellen’s fungus-filled trip to China. Diving instructor Wang Cheng-Ru, who took these pictures, thinks that it came out to shallow waters to die. The fish, we mean, not Yellen.