A shimmering, silver ribbon of fish on a California beach is enough to stop even seasoned locals in their tracks. When that fish is an oarfish, social media quickly upgrades it to a “doomsday fish” and starts asking whether the Big One is finally coming. The reality, as I see it from the science and the folklore, is far stranger and more interesting than a simple yes or no about an impending megaquake.
The latest stranding has revived a familiar cycle: eerie photos, anxious speculation and a rush of experts trying to separate deep-sea biology from disaster prophecy. The question is not just whether a single carcass predicts an earthquake, but why this rare animal has become a canvas for seismic fears in places like California and Japan.
How a deep-sea oddball became the “doomsday fish”
The giant oarfish is already primed for legend: a long, ribbon-like body, a crimson fin and a habit of living far below the surface where almost nobody sees it alive. When one of these animals washes ashore, it looks like a myth dragged out of the abyss, which helps explain how it picked up the ominous nickname that now dominates headlines. In California, recent strandings have been framed as a kind of countdown clock, with some residents treating each new carcass as another tick toward catastrophe, even as marine biologists stress that the “doomsday” label is a human invention, not a scientific one, and that the name itself has been traced in part through reporting that highlighted how people linked oarfish to a past earthquake.
Folklore from Japan has done much of the work in cementing that reputation. Stories there describe long, silvery fish appearing before major tremors, and those tales have migrated into English-language coverage that now treats the oarfish as a kind of global omen. Yet when researchers and skeptics have gone back through the record, they have found that oarfish are spotted around the world every year with no corresponding spike in seismic activity, and that the pattern is largely a media construction. One detailed critique pointed out how even a relatively small 4.4 magnitude event near La Jolla cove in San Diego was retrofitted into a narrative about a washed-up fish, illustrating what it called an “unfortunate media trend” to turn oarfish into a doomsday symbol.
What scientists actually know about oarfish and earthquakes
When I look at the data rather than the legends, the link between oarfish and earthquakes falls apart. Marine institutes that have fielded a flood of questions after recent Southern California strandings have been blunt, noting in public comments that there is no proven connection between these fish and seismic events, even in Japan where the myth is strongest. They have pointed to a study that examined supposed correlations and found no reliable pattern, a conclusion echoed in their own review of strandings.
Other researchers have tried to test the idea more broadly, comparing known oarfish appearances with earthquake catalogs and looking for any statistically significant overlap. One analysis highlighted a 13-foot specimen recorded in 2022 and similar cases, then concluded that there was no meaningful correlation with seismic events, despite the persistence of the myth. Scientists quoted in that work emphasized that biological factors and changing ocean conditions are far more plausible explanations for why a deep-sea animal might end up near shore, and they stressed that, despite the folklore, there is still no scientific evidence that these fish are reliable omens.
From Japan to California, how the myth spread
The modern panic around oarfish did not start in California, but the state has become a stage where global folklore and local seismic anxiety collide. In Japan, stories of mysterious fish appearing before quakes have circulated for generations, and those tales were amplified after the 2011 Tohoku disaster, when people retrospectively linked scattered sightings to the tragedy. As those narratives crossed the Pacific, they met a West Coast audience already primed by decades of warnings about the “Big One,” so each new carcass on a beach from the Philippines to California slotted neatly into an existing fear that nature might be sending a coded message, even though biologists repeatedly note that most of these animals are simply dead, dying or injured.
In California, that imported folklore has mixed with local reporting and social media to create what one analysis called “muddled” beliefs about what oarfish actually signify. Coverage has described how residents along the coast, from San Diego to more northern beaches, share photos of each new specimen with captions that treat the fish as a countdown to disaster, even as experts remind them that there was never a solid scientific basis for tying these animals to earthquakes in the first place. The result is a feedback loop in which each new stranding reinforces a story that started elsewhere, even though the underlying evidence has not changed, a dynamic captured in reporting that traced how folklore from Japan has been reinterpreted along the California coast.
What recent California sightings really tell us
Recent months have delivered a string of encounters that show why oarfish fascinate people even without any apocalyptic overlay. In Southern California, a rare specimen that washed ashore was described as the third such appearance in the region this year, and researchers noted that it was only the 22nd recorded in the area over the past century, a reminder of how unusual these events remain. That same coverage highlighted how the fish’s sheer size and metallic sheen made it an instant spectacle on a crowded beach in Southern California.
Farther north, divers have had the kind of encounters most people only see in viral clips. One report described how a diver in Monterey Bay came across what was called one of the world’s rarest fish, lingering long enough to film the animal before leaving it undisturbed in the deep water off the Bay Area coast. Another account from a separate dive trip featured Californian scuba diver Ted Judah and his wife, with writer Steve Weinman recounting how Judah described the animal as a “silvery knife-blade undulating thing,” a phrase that captures both the fish’s shape and the uncanny feeling of meeting it underwater, and that same piece noted the time as 10:41 am when the sighting was discussed. Together, those stories show that oarfish are not just beach carcasses but living, elusive creatures that occasionally cross paths with people in places like California.
The fascination is not limited to California either. A separate account described how a diver in Monterey Bay, highlighted by Active NorCal, shared images of a long, gleaming fish that matched the classic oarfish profile, with the outlet’s “Diver Stumbles Upon One of the World’s Rarest Fish in Monterey Bay” framing the encounter as a once-in-a-lifetime moment before the diver, identified through the piece’s “Active” and “Follow” tags, left the animal alone in the depths. Elsewhere along the Pacific, another report detailed how a fish flailing in shallow water drew in a bystander named Hayes, who tried to help guide it back out before it swam straight away and later washed ashore in Mexico, a sequence that fed fresh speculation about whether such strandings might be linked to tsunami warnings for California and Oregon, even though the same coverage noted that more recent examples still do not prove any predictive power for oarfish.
If oarfish are not warning us, what should we watch instead?
For all the drama around a single carcass on the sand, the people who actually study earthquakes are focused on very different signals. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program, for example, monitors and reports on seismic activity using dense networks of instruments, then turns that data into hazard assessments and preparedness guidance for communities that live with the risk of shaking. That program’s work is summarized in press resources that describe how it “Monitors and reports on earthquakes and their impacts, providing preparedness information and hazard assessments,” a mission that has nothing to do with reading omens from fish.
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