... this monstrosity is coming my way today, and I'm not ready for it ....

Would love to preserve it down, but I simply don't have facilities for it. Anyone any experience making casts of animals? We'll try this first, latex, at HUGE expense, and then fillet it (in the process, do an autopsy; full parasite load examination, see what's in that belly, and look for any other apparent sign of distress/abnormality), then articulate the skeleton (HUGE cost).

It seems like too great an opportunity to pass up.

Anyone want to wing there way to NZ to help out this week?

Just be sure to use the latex with the ammonia drying agent, at least it will smell like a big squid. :lol:

I wish I was qualified to help you out. Sounds fun.

I'm just curious (and ignorant of the subject, I admit), but
what is the significance of a sunfish? I was always under the
impression that these were fairly common beasties, and were
ALWAYS huge. :hmm:

I guess I'm wrong, huh?

I've never done a big cast, but if I were in your shoes I might try this: after you've got a few layers of latex or silicone dry to get the surface detail, start putting down layers of fiberglass cloth and epoxy boatbuilding resin (you could try polyester resin for lesser expense) to give the mold a strong mother to hold its shape. I've used plaster mothers on decent-sized bone molds (up to say a meter) but that would be way too heavy on a critter like that. You might (read: make your students) practice the technique on something smaller.

Dan

I'm just curious (and ignorant of the subject, I admit), but
what is the significance of a sunfish? I was always under the
impression that these were fairly common beasties, and were
ALWAYS huge. :hmm:

I guess I'm wrong, huh?

No, not wrong, but they're certainly not common down this neck of the woods; to us big things like this are the exception. I'm not too sure how we're going to handle this yet, but the fibreglass/latex combination sounds good (thanks Dan).

Another thing I just thought of if you went the fiberglass route, you might consider fiberglassing 2x4s or furring strips into it to add more rigidity: the composite on its own will be pretty stiff, but there will clearly be a lot of bending moment on it.

I was just thinking about some burlap/plaster field casts for real big dino bones I've seen that had 2x4s worked in. These also served as handles or hardpoints for a front-end loader or forklift.

Dan

We had a juvenile down here a few years back (they're even rarer down this end of the country). It was in pretty bad shape when it arrived so no chance of getting a cast buit we buried it and now have a skeleton to rearticulate......when we feel brave and are REALLY bored! It's quite a puzzle.

J

You might (read: make your students) practice the technique on something smaller.

<heads for the hills>

I seem to recall that Mola molas have a huge parasite load... Also they have the cutest larval stage - looks just like a puffer fish (which makes sense since they are related to puffer fish)... wish I had some spare time, I would love to help out!

We had a couple off Dover harbour a couple of months ago. I was surprised to learn that that these things must therefore have a global distribution, within certain parameters of temperature and salinity of course. NZ and the UK are practically opposite sides to each other on the Earths surface, yet we share some of the same fish. Fascinating.

A little too far to come to help out at the weekend though Steve. Sorry.

I second the fiberglass-resin-- I just fixed my rusty car roof with boatbuilding fiberglass, and it was great! Just make sure you work fast if it's a hot day, 'cause it sets up faster than you think it will!

We get sunfish off California, but there aren't many that size around these days. I see a lot in old pictures from the 1920s or so; I think the big ones got fished out in this area in the mid 20th century.

ANy ideas to whieght? That is a big one. I wonder how many guys it took to secure the fins so it would fit in the boxcar...?

The weight worries me; I have a 3-ton weight restriction on the 2nd-floor carpark into which I'm taking it. The trucking company reckon to ~ 6 tons - I think not - the freezer fellow reckons 2 tons minimum, I reckon closer to 1.2 tons .... but I have no comparative experience. Perhaps we should weigh the 'bits', as I don't have big enough scales to put this puppy on!

With some good measurements it shouldn't be too tough to estimate the volume and mass?

find a truck stop.... weigh the vehicle you'll use and any trailer, go pick up the fish and then go again.... (minus the pallet after you've moved the fish)

it may be just be a story, but back in the day (think 50s/60s) there was a story about weighing an american football lineman (suposedly the first 300#er) at a truck stop since they didnt have scales that went that high....

are mola any good for eating? the fact that it got sent to steve instead of market suggests no....

are mola any good for eating? the fact that it got sent to steve instead of market suggests no....
Exactly what are you saying, sweetums? Hmmmm. Anyone seen WK in the market recently?

I have heard that they make good eating, although cuttlegirl's earlier, re parasite loading, is cause for concern.

ok good point.... i mustve spaced on that part of the thread.....

i didnt mean anything - unless theres a history of possibly unsafe seafood being sent you way...

what? :twisted: buy you a fugu dinner? :smile:

Concerning their parasite load, their parasites have parasites - I have a link with a list of some of the common parasites found on mola mola, I will post it later.

http://www.oceansunfish.org/lifehistory.html

find a truck stop.... weigh the vehicle you'll use and any trailer, go pick up the fish and then go again.... (minus the pallet after you've moved the fish).

I have done this same thing (admittedly not with a giant sunfish) at the county dump. They have accurate vehicle scales, are generally interested in helping (if they are bored), and don't mind the smell. :grin:

Concerning their parasite load, their parasites have parasites - I have a link with a list of some of the common parasites found on mola mola, I will post it later.

http://www.oceansunfish.org/lifehistory.html

Fascinating website CG. Thanks for posting it. :smile:

NZ and the UK are practically opposite sides to each other on the Earths surface, yet we share some of the same fish. Fascinating.


Actually NZ and the North Atlantic share quite a few deep-sea species; orange roughy for one.


Matt

Here she be. Defrosting in the car park... still mostly frozen, but the, ah, aroma has already attracted a few flies. And onlookers.

http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/x/x38d.jpg

OMG, OMG, OMG...

Absolutely MASSIVE...

If only Kiwiland weren't exactly halfway accross the globe....

We're frantically trying to get someone to make a cast of it ... and it's beginning to smell somewhat .... Ifw e don't get a cast made this afternoon, or first thing morrow, we'll have to carve it up and just do the skeleton, and that would be such a tremendous waste.

The company that had it stored for us was desperate to get it out - they needed the space (understandably); otherwise we'd have had more time to organise this

I'll can make a cast of it. Buy all the bagged ice in town and get me a plane ticket :)

DHyslop,

Was that a suggestion for the new unit of measurement for Mola to be a spaceshuttle? Their not quite as easy to draw as double-decker buses...:wink:

Wow, absolutely fabulous creature! They are so unusual looking. I really hope Oceanus is looking out for you and the most can be made of this opportunity. Good luck!

Cheers!

Although I realize the beast is on its side, the resemblence was too much to pass up. The X-38 crew rescue vehicle would have been about twice the length of the fish, for reference.

Dan

The mould is currently going on!

:smile:

Sure is. :smile:

Good luck!

How do you turn it over? Good luck on the mouth, especially...

I've got some beluga sturgeon, a couple of arapaima and a record wels catfish in the freezer, if you're interested :wink:

Hey, our fush made the papers (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10412167) - amazing since it's been a huge news day down here (politics and all).

From the article:

"He spent $5000 shipping it to Auckland in a refrigerated railway container, and said he was likely to spend another $5000 before the week was out on the silicone mould and preserving the skeleton.

Though not a rich man, Dr O'Shea said it was money well spent."

This reads like you spent your own money on this....Say it isn't so!:bugout: :shock: :goofysca:

Robbing Peter to pay Paul, that's all.

Hopefully we can recover some of the costs of this exercise by on-selling casts; someone has already asked to buy the mould!!! (that's a negative, sorry).

Here are a few more pics courtesy of Emma Beatson (here at AUT - studying whale diet) [that's Emma crouching down next to the fish in one of the shots].

That is a truly awesome beast!

"There is a season, turn, turn, turn"

Did you manage already? Maybe half is actually sufficient, if you intend wall dispay, rather than suspended...

Quite curious about the end result (hope to be able to see it when next in Auckland :smile: )

I didn´t see this thread in the last days, so my suggestion for another type of cast is too late. I have a book about the dessection of fish for fishing trophies, which shows several comparably easy ways to make such things at home. One of the easiest ways was a simple two-part gypsum-form which can be filled with hardening foam or epoxy resin. As molas are very compact animals without any thin spines or fins, such a form had probably well worked, and is furthermore very very cheap in contrast to silicone moulds. I have never tried it (because I go only fishing when I´m in holiday), but I have made uncountable other casts with gypsum for a completely other purpose, and the surface details are really fine.The huge size and the weight could cause several problems, but there would be surely solutions. Perhaps you can try it the next time if you get a smaller sunfish.

There are some things that you do once in a lifetime because the opportunity never presents itself twice, and then there are the things that you do once in a lifetime simply because you swear you'd never do them again.

Learn from our lesson here; don't even contemplate boning out a gargantuan sunfish!! In fact, let TONMO.com be a sunfish-free zone from this day forth!!

We are exhausted! Into day 3 tomorrow - the cleanup day - and what a cleanup! A whale is 10 orders of magnitude easier to process than a sunfish! Try cutting through skin 5 inches thick (no joke!!), like that of a shark in that it is covered in denticles, each intent on shredding you to pieces!

We've had nearly 10 people working on this animal; we all dislike sunfish intensely! These fish are horrible!

Could you perhaps post a cross-section picture of the skin?
By the way, you probably already know this very nice site about the dissection of a sharptail mola, if not, it could be interesting: http://fishanatomy.net/webpages/fish/mola/mola.htm

There are some things that you do once in a lifetime because the opportunity never presents itself twice, and then there are the things that you do once in a lifetime simply because you swear you'd never do them again.

Learn from our lesson here; don't even contemplate boning out a gargantuan sunfish!! In fact, let TONMO.com be a sunfish-free zone from this day forth!!

We are exhausted! Into day 3 tomorrow - the cleanup day - and what a cleanup! A whale is 10 orders of magnitude easier to process than a sunfish! Try cutting through skin 5 inches thick (no joke!!), like that of a shark in that it is covered in denticles, each intent on shredding you to pieces!

We've had nearly 10 people working on this animal; we all dislike sunfish intensely! These fish are horrible!


All I can say is.........he he he! :sagrin: :twisted:

J

Hey, aren't Mola Mola the largest bony fish in the world? Yeah, I know, not the largest fish fish in the world, that'd be Whale Sharks, but they're condri.... chondich.... condrichth.... uh, thingies with notochords.

Mola Mola always struck me as rather placid beasties -- maybe cruising along with all that attached fauna tends to produce a stoical acceptance of life's emotional baggage.

Well, it appears to work that way for sloths, anyhow....

Tani
(4:30 a.m. with too much green tea in my bloodstream
and not enough digestible leftovers in the fridge)

One of my cobbers here at work (AUT/EOS), Steve Cook, has put together a wee time-lapse photography movie of the 'filleting', at least for day 1 (we didn't do this for day 2). What you'll see is 5 hours of hard work condensed into a few seconds. Unfortunately I cannot add the file (technology challenges me), so have sent to Tony.

We were absolutely shattered Saturday eve - so-much-so we just walked away from our bags of dead and deceased fish, intending to come back Sunday morn and take it away. Well, broken and exhausted on Sunday morn I thought ... Sunday eve will be just fine'. So, Sunday eve, with a trailer on the back of the wagon, I drove in, only to find that the sunfish remains were gone! Apparently we had placed the remains next to the intake for the airconditioning of an adjacent apartment complex, and the smell was outrageous - people puking and what not. AUT Security were called in and being unable to contact me ended up disposing of near 2 tons of fish guts themselves! (I missed many calls on the phone on Sunday). My name is MUD!

Ouch! Sorry to hear that.

Steve -- I'm sorry to hear that as well!

Here is the AWESOME video (http://www.tonmo.com/images/vids/Sunfish.wmv). This thread is one for the ages. I will likely work to convert the content into an article-friendly format.

Sorry to hear it (although I must admit, I'm perhaps almost as sorry for the apartment dwellers). I'm surprised the AUT security people didn't deliver it to your front lawn out of spite-- then you don't lose the fish, they get the problem solved and some smug satisfaction, and the only victims are your neighbors... who are presumably used to you carting large, smelly aquatic creatures about, if that "WildBoyz" episode is any indication... You sound like there is no hope of recovering the bones from wherever the AUT security folks took it-- was it destroyed/incinerated/sunk at sea/???

I thought you Kiwi's said "flats" rather than "apartments" like the Brits-- I guess I was confused?

:grin: Sorry, I should have been more clear; we still have the bones (we extracted them late Saturday eve)!! I'd have seen red if we lost those after all of that work; they're in a 3m x 1m stainless steel vat, pickling down. Security only disposed of ~ 70 rubbish sacks of offal (saving us this most unpleasant job).

in that case, I'm really more sympathetic for the apartment-dwellers! :yuck:

...and the security guards!

Sweet deal, Steve! And an amazing video. My favourite part is watching the dorsal fin slowly fall towards the ground as the layers of supporting flesh are peeled away. Very systematic. I'm impressed! All you need now is to choreograph your dissections to music!

Cheers!

This must be really a hard job. I know how much work it is to dissect a human body and presevere all the important anatomical structures and how much squirmy leftovers accrue, but it must be horrible if you can wade in those leftovers. The removing of the skin alone was surely a nightmare, skinning a human can already be difficult enough...

By the way, if anybody wonders why I dissected (or am still dissecting) a human body, I have not to dispose murder victim, but for some strange reason I have to absolve a practical anatomy-class this semester.

The one in the green pants and striped shirt is my sister. :heee:

The one in the green pants and striped shirt is my sister. :heee:

Really? I was almost sure that it was you sportin' a new hair do! Hope the battin' is going well down in NZ.

This must be really a hard job. I know how much work it is to dissect a human body and presevere all the important anatomical structures and how much squirmy leftovers accrue, but it must be horrible if you can wade in those leftovers. The removing of the skin alone was surely a nightmare, skinning a human can already be difficult enough...

By the way, if anybody wonders why I dissected (or am still dissecting) a human body, I have not to dispose murder victim, but for some strange reason I have to absolve a practical anatomy-class this semester.

I had to remove dogs heads to ship to Austin for rabies tests. That was not pleasant to say the least. I couldn't handle doing a human body.

That Sunfish had some crazy insullation... it's flesh looks like chunks of styrofoam. Was it thawed or still fairly frozen?

The stench must've been incredible. We occasionally boil seal or sea lion heads (to get at the teeth,for ageing, in particular without damaging the skull) and that's fairly aromatic. We have an advantage tho' we're out in the country with only one residence near by...the resident tech who should be used to odd aromas! Security does come out but they've learned to ignore such pongs (although it usually sets the dogs to drooling!!!!!!).

I guess now you have the fun of re-articulating the bones!

J

The stench must've been incredible. We occasionally boil seal or sea lion heads (to get at the teeth,for ageing, in particular without damaging the skull) and that's fairly aromatic. We have an advantage tho' we're out in the country with only one residence near by...the resident tech who should be used to odd aromas! Security does come out but they've learned to ignore such pongs (although it usually sets the dogs to drooling!!!!!!).

I guess now you have the fun of re-articulating the bones!

J

Actually one of the many weird things regarding the sunfish was that it didn't smell bad. Well apart from when I did gut content analysis; that smelt as bad as decomposing whale...

Here's a pic later on in the dissection...

Amazing what you can do with a water blaster.

I have hundreds of pictures of this sunfish, unfortunately I'm currently stuck on a dial-up connection so I'm putting them up small, one at a time...

Still, it's better than no internet at all.

...more sunfish carnage...

I give up, where do I find the video?
"D"

Per your request... it was reply #47....

Steve -- I'm sorry to hear that as well!

Here is the AWESOME video (http://www.tonmo.com/images/vids/Sunfish.wmv). This thread is one for the ages. I will likely work to convert the content into an article-friendly format.

Wow awesome thread.. Was the fish found dead?

The stench must've been incredible. We occasionally boil seal or sea lion heads (to get at the teeth,for ageing, in particular without damaging the skull) and that's fairly aromatic. We have an advantage tho' we're out in the country with only one residence near by...the resident tech who should be used to odd aromas! Security does come out but they've learned to ignore such pongs (although it usually sets the dogs to drooling!!!!!!).

I guess now you have the fun of re-articulating the bones!

J

You should probably get some dermestid beetles...I'm working on establishing a colony myself. They're the best way to clean bones without getting them greasy as boiling does -- although you'd need an incredible colony to clean this monster sunfish!

Wow awesome thread.. Was the fish found dead?

Yes, dead, floating at sea. We did a buoyancy test on the tissues; they are positively so. Several days after the press release I got a call from a yachtsman that claimed to have hit the brute with the keel of his yacht (accidentally of course). Immediately afterwards the fish was disoriented at the surface, on its side, then it disappeared. I have no way of knowing whether the story is true (I get lots of strange calls) but it does sound reasonable.