In the wake of a powerful earthquake (7.0 on the Richter scale) that struck off the coast of northern California recently, on December 6, 2024, I was reminded of a few news stories in recent months about rare discoveries of oarfish having been washed ashore on beaches in the area recently.
The reason I was reminded of this is because – as I wrote some 11 years ago – the rare appearance of oarfish in shallow waters or being washed ashore has a legendary connection to earthquakes, tsunamis and disasters – in Japan they are known as ryugu no tsukai, or “Messengers from the Sea God’s Palace”. Some 20 oarfish were encountered along the coastline of Japan in the two years before the catastrophic 2011 earthquake (9.0 on the Richter scale) and subsequent tsunami. In a news story that preceded the disaster, Yoshiaki Kai, an assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Maizuru Fisheries Research Station, noted “I have never heard of so many of them coming up like this.”
The oarfish can grow to massive lengths, with some reports of specimens reaching 17 metres long (the title image to this story is of a 7-metre-long oarfish found washed up on the shore near San Diego in September 1996). With its astonishing length and silvery snake-like body, the species may be responsible for at least some of the legends of huge sea serpents.
Oarfish are generally a deep sea fish and so are rarely sighted – but over the last few months, three oarfish have been found washed ashore on the beaches of California, with news stories that preceded the December 6 earthquake noting the fish’s legendary reputation as a harbinger “of natural disasters or earthquakes” (thankfully, despite the subsequent tsunami warning, that particular threat did not manifest).
However, it has to be noted that a 2019 study that analysed whether oarfish sightings correlated with earthquakes did not find a link, concluding that there did not appear to be a “spatiotemporal relationship between deep‐sea fish appearances and earthquakes”, and thus that “this Japanese folklore is deemed to be a superstition attributed to the illusory correlation between the two events.”
As they say, anecdote is not evidence…but this most recent triple sighting before a major undersea earthquake does still make me wonder if there is something to the folklore.
