'Doomsday fish' appears in California. Two days later, earthquake hits LA

A rare, giant "doomsday fish" recently washed up at a California beach, and two days later an earthquake struck the region. You might wonder what the appearance of the fish has to do with the quake. Apparently, these fishes are said to bring with them earthquakes and other disasters.

Japanese folklore calls them harbingers of disaster. They have also formed the basis of ancient tales of sea monsters, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The creature in question is an oarfish and has only been seen 20 times in the region since 1901, according to a statement released by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

This particular marine animal was a 12-foot-long (3.7 metres) short-crested oarfish. They live thousands of feet deep in oceans and are hardly ever seen. They look like a silver ribbon and filter-feed on krill and crustaceans.

The oarfish was seen near San Diego on August 10, and on August 12, an earthquake of magnitude 4.4 hit Los Angeles.

"There's this thought that they're a doomsday fish or a bad omen and that they seem to signal things like tsunamis or earthquakes," Zachary Heiple, a doctoral student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told Live Science.

Heiple was a part of the team that recovered the oarfish.

Is the fish really the reason for earthquake?

He added that the sighting of the fish had nothing to do with the quake. He cited a 2019 study published in the journal Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America that rubbished the belief as mere superstition.

Also Read:Giant sea scorpions, some as big as humans, lived 444 million years ago

"There didn't really seem to be any correlation," Heiple said.

However, he admits that the belief shows the connection between oarfish and humans in the past.

"But it's a really interesting tidbit because it shows how oarfish and human history have interacted throughout time. "

It was found in a shallow reef by a group of marine scientists. Emily Miller, a research associate at California Sea Grant, told LiveScience that "the highly reflective surface of the oarfish was still brilliantly obvious underwater."

The Scripps statement said that the oarfish had been taken to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) facility. Samples from the fish will be used to learn more about the animal. The reason for the oarfish dying is not known yet, but it was in good condition, the statement added.