Oarfish are among the rarest fish most people will ever see, but they aren’t actually rare in the biological sense. They live in every major ocean on Earth and carry a “Least Concern” conservation status, meaning scientists don’t consider them threatened. What makes them seem impossibly rare is where they live: deep underwater, far from human eyes, at depths of 20 to 200 meters and sometimes as deep as 1,000 meters. Only about 300 sightings have been formally recorded since 1900, and most of those involved dead or dying animals that washed ashore.
Why Oarfish Seem So Rare
The gap between how many oarfish exist and how often humans encounter them comes down to habitat. Oarfish spend their lives in open water far below the surface, drifting through the mesopelagic zone, the dimly lit layer of ocean that starts where sunlight fades. They don’t school near reefs, feed at the surface, or live near the seafloor where trawling nets might scoop them up. They occupy a part of the ocean that humans rarely visit and barely monitor.
When oarfish do show up, it’s almost always because something has gone wrong. A sick, injured, or dying oarfish drifts upward or washes onto a beach, creating a spectacle precisely because no one expects it. Healthy oarfish going about their normal lives are almost never observed. The handful of live sightings on camera have come from deep-sea ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) and underwater oil rig cameras, not from divers or fishermen.
How Often Sightings Actually Happen
A database compiled for a study presented at the European Geosciences Union collected records of more than 300 oarfish sightings globally from 1900 to the present. That works out to roughly two or three documented encounters per year worldwide, though they don’t arrive on any predictable schedule. Some years pass with no sightings at all. Others produce clusters.
Southern California had an unusual streak in 2024. In August, kayakers and snorkelers found the body of a 12-foot specimen in La Jolla Cove. According to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, that was only the 20th known oarfish to wash up in California since 1901. Two more dead oarfish followed in the same state that year: one in September in Orange County and another in November about 25 miles north of San Diego. Then in February 2025, an oarfish surfaced alive on a beach in Baja California Sur, Mexico, swimming toward shore repeatedly even after being guided back into the water. It appeared to have a wound on its face.
Three California strandings in a single year sounds alarming, but scientists generally attribute clusters like this to coincidence, ocean current patterns, or localized changes in water conditions rather than any single dramatic cause.
The Largest Bony Fish You’ll Probably Never See
Part of what fuels the fascination is sheer size. The oarfish holds the record as the longest bony fish alive today. The maximum reported length is 36 feet, and the heaviest published weight is 600 pounds. Most specimens people actually encounter measure closer to 10 feet, which is still startling when it shows up on a public beach.
Their body shape adds to the alien appearance. Oarfish are extremely long and flat, like a silver ribbon, with a bright red dorsal fin running the entire length of their body and elongated fin rays near the head that look like a crown. When filmed alive in the deep sea, they’ve been observed swimming vertically, head pointed upward, propelling themselves by undulating that long dorsal fin in waves. One researcher who spotted a live oarfish from an oil rig camera in the Gulf of Mexico initially mistook it for a metal pipe being lowered into the water.
The Earthquake Connection
In Japanese folklore, oarfish appearances are omens of earthquakes. The idea gained traction internationally after oarfish washed ashore in Japan, the Philippines, and California near periods of seismic activity. Researchers decided to test this statistically by plotting the coordinates of those 300-plus sightings against tectonic plate boundaries. They found a strong geographic association: oarfish tend to show up near plate boundaries. But that correlation likely reflects where oarfish live and where coastlines exist, not a predictive link to earthquakes. Sightings that didn’t occur near plate boundaries could be explained by ocean currents carrying the fish to the nearest available beach. No study has established a reliable timing connection between oarfish strandings and seismic events.
Rare to Us, Not to the Ocean
The distinction worth understanding is that oarfish rarity is observational, not biological. They occupy every temperate and tropical ocean, from shallow waters at 15 meters down to 1,000 meters. Their populations aren’t considered at risk. They simply live in a part of the ocean where cameras, boats, and people don’t go. If you could survey the mesopelagic zone the way biologists survey coral reefs, oarfish would likely seem far less mythical.
That said, the chance of seeing one in person remains extraordinarily small. Even marine biologists who spend careers studying deep-sea species often never encounter a live oarfish. For most people, the closest encounter will be a viral video of a silver ribbon of a fish washing onto someone’s vacation beach, looking like it belongs to a different planet entirely.