Very excited to announce the most recent publication entitled Hook, line, and social media: crowd-sourced images reveal size and species patterns of ocean sunfishes (Tetraodontiformes, Molidae) from California to Alaska

This paper chronicles the appearances of Mola tecta within the California Current and shows that, far from being a one off stranding, Mola tecta has been spotted more than 40 times all the way up to Kodiak Alaska. This plethora of sightings was gathered from reviewing reams of available data from all manner of citizen science sources. And if you are looking for a terrific key to identifying molid species differences–check out the figures.

Biggest kudos go to  MMarianne Nyegaard(mola researcher extraordinaire!) and Tor Mowatt-Larssen (dedicated research ichthyologist and mola afficianado) for spearheading this whole manuscript and pushing it over the finish line. The whole team including Jackie Hildering, Eric Caldera, Ellen Biesack and Jan McDowell were completely delightful to work with. 

I have a fun story to relate about the fabulous first author Tor Mowatt-Larssen. When Tor was a sophomore at Carmel High in 2014, he attended a mola talk I gave at the highschool in March. Right after the talk, he emailed me to see if I had any internships available since he had a strong interest in ocean sunfish. I didn’t have anything  at the time but we stayed in touch. And from the first meeting I could see that Tor, even at such a young age, was a very  motivated biologist in the making (he’d volunteered hundreds of hours at our local SPCA, gotten certified to dive and his passion for animals was purely evident.  When COVID came around, he emailed again and asked if there were any sunfish research opportunities and it is Tor who really helped me kickstart the whole Ocean Sunfish book. 

I am sooooo happy to see this paper come out with Tor as first author and look forward to more of his contributions to the field. And Marianne has just been amazing to work with as well. Such an eye for detail and vital identification skills and a great mentor for Tor as well.

So a big whooohoooo to everyone involved–including all those volunteer eyes in the field making their reports on inaturalist, and their local groups and much more.  A true group effort.

Thanks for taking a read and pass along this paper to whosoever you think might be interested.