No, the 'Doomsday Fish' Can't Predict Earthquakes: Fact-Checking the Oarfish Omen
On a Saturday morning in August 2024, a group of kayakers and snorkelers paddling off La Jolla Cove in San Diego spotted something that did not look real. Floating at the surface was a 12-foot-long silver ribbon of a fish with a blood-red crest running along its head — a giant oarfish, a creature that normally lives hundreds of feet below the surface in the dark of the open ocean. The group worked with lifeguards to tow the carcass ashore and handed it over to scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It was only the twentieth oarfish recorded off the California coast in more than 120 years.
Within hours, the headlines arrived, and they all asked the same question. “Doomsday fish.” “Bad omen.” “Earthquake warning?” In Japanese folklore, the oarfish is a messenger of disaster: when one appears in shallow water, an earthquake is said to be coming. And then, as if scripted, a magnitude 4.4 earthquake rattled parts of Southern California just a couple of days later. Spooky, the articles called it. A warning heeded too late.
ProofNews has covered many claims that travel this exact route — from folklore to viral headline to something people half-believe before breakfast. This one is worth the full treatment, because it sits at the intersection of real animals, real disasters, and the human mind’s hunger for warning signs. We went back to the folklore, to the animals, and to the one study that tested the claim with more than eighty years of data. The answer is decisive.
The Claim, As It Circulates
The viral claim has a simple, memorable shape: when an oarfish appears — washed up on a beach, floating dead at the surface, caught by a diver’s camera — it is an omen that an earthquake, a tsunami, or some other natural disaster is about to strike. The fish is called the “doomsday fish” in English-language coverage, and in Japanese tradition it is known as ryugu no tsukai, “the messenger from the sea god’s palace.” The premise is that the animal, living in the deep sea near the seafloor, somehow senses the geological unrest that precedes a quake and flees toward the surface, where people find it.
Every new sighting now triggers the same machinery. A beachgoer posts a photo of the long silver body. News outlets recycle the folklore. Comment sections fill with nervous locals asking whether they should pack a go-bag. The claim has even jumped oceans: oarfish strandings in California, Mexico, and Taiwan now generate the same earthquake questions, even though the folklore is Japanese and the geology is completely different.
The claim survives for a reason that has nothing to do with evidence. It is cheap to believe, impossible for an ordinary person to disprove on the spot, and it arrives pre-packaged with drama: a sea-serpent-looking creature from the abyss, a trembling earth, a warning from a sea god. But folklore, however old, is not a dataset. So let’s look at the dataset.
Where the Legend Was Born
The belief that deep-sea fish herald earthquakes is old in Japan — some accounts trace it to the seventeenth century — and it grew up around a real animal that people genuinely did not understand. The oarfish’s Japanese name, ryugu no tsukai, places it in the court of Ryujin, the sea deity of Shinto and Buddhist tradition. A serpent-like fish that could grow longer than a school bus, surfacing rarely and usually dead, was easy to read as a message from the deep.
The modern version of the legend got its biggest boost from the worst earthquake in Japan’s recorded history. In the months before the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake of March 2011, local news reports noted that roughly twenty oarfish and other deep-sea fish had washed ashore along Japan’s coast. After the disaster, those strandings were retroactively stitched into the story: the fish had been warning us, and nobody listened. It is the kind of pattern that feels meaningful only in hindsight — and it is exactly the kind of pattern that scientists decided to test.
That is where Yoshiaki Orihara enters the story. Orihara, a researcher at Tokai University’s Institute of Oceanic Research and Development, became interested in the deep-sea fish stories after the 2011 disaster. If the folklore were true, he reasoned, fish appearances could actually be useful — a biological early-warning system for one of the most earthquake-prone nations on Earth. So he and his colleagues did what nobody had done before: they built the spreadsheet.
The Animal Behind the Myth
Before judging the claim, it helps to meet the fish, because almost everything about the oarfish’s reputation comes from how strange it is. The giant oarfish is listed by Guinness World Records as the longest bony fish in the world: individuals can reach 36 feet (about 11 meters) and weigh up to 600 pounds. It has a flat, silvery, ribbon-like body, a vivid red dorsal fin crest that sweeps back from its head, and a peculiar habit of swimming vertically, head up, so that from above or below it is nearly invisible. Its face, with its protruding jaw and red fin rays, looks like something assembled from spare parts.
Oarfish live in the mesopelagic zone — the ocean’s twilight layer — typically between about 650 and 3,300 feet below the surface, in temperate and tropical waters around the world. Despite their monstrous size, they are filter feeders: according to NOAA Fisheries, they strain plankton and small crustaceans from the water column. They are mid-water swimmers, feeding in the water column rather than hugging the seafloor. That detail matters, and we will come back to it.
They are also staggeringly rare to human eyes. Ben Frable, the manager of the Marine Vertebrate Collection at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has noted that the La Jolla specimen was only the twentieth oarfish recorded off California since 1901 — and scientists rarely get to study the species at all. The 2024 La Jolla fish was dissected in a necropsy by scientists from NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center and Scripps to try to determine its cause of death, and then preserved for the collection, one of the largest deep-sea fish holdings in the world. Later that same year, in November 2024, a smaller nine-to-ten-foot oarfish turned up near Encinitas, north of San Diego — the twenty-first California record. In the summer of 2025, yet another twelve-footer was spotted off the Southern California coast. Sightings have also been reported off Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Maine, and New Jersey.
Why do they surface at all? The experts who study them point to the simplest explanations first. Hiroyuki Motomura, a professor of ichthyology at Kagoshima University in Japan, told the New York Post that no scientific evidence supports a direct link between oarfish appearances and earthquakes, and offered his own reading of the strandings: “I believe these fish tend to surface when their physical condition is poor, which is why they are frequently found dead.” Sick animals, storms, shifts in currents and water temperature, disorientation — these are the ordinary mechanisms that push a deep-water fish toward a beach. Nothing about them requires a tectonic trigger.
That last point is worth underlining, because the folklore’s mechanism has a hidden flaw. The story assumes the oarfish senses unrest down near the seafloor, where earthquake faults live. But the oarfish is not a bottom-dweller. It swims in the water column, far above the fault zones. A fish that never visits the neighborhood where earthquakes are born is a poor candidate for an earthquake sensor.
The Test: 83 Years of Records, One Plausible Hit
Orihara’s team assembled a database of deep-sea fish appearances in Japan — oarfish and the similarly omen-laden slender ribbonfish — from newspaper archives covering November 1928 to March 2011. Then they did the obvious, unfashionable thing: they checked those appearances against the earthquake record.
The study, published in 2019 in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, looked at 336 deep-sea fish sightings and 221 earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or larger. The researchers tested whether fish appeared in the 10 or 30 days before a quake, within 50 or 100 kilometers of its epicenter. They focused on magnitude 6.0 and above because those are the quakes previously linked to reported “precursor phenomena like unusual animal behavior,” as Orihara put it.
The result was about as negative as a scientific result can be. Out of 336 fish sightings and 221 earthquakes, the team found only one event that could have been plausibly correlated. There were no recorded deep-sea fish appearances before any earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or larger. And no earthquake above magnitude 6.0 occurred within ten days of a deep-sea fish appearance. “As a result, one can hardly confirm the association between the two phenomena,” the authors wrote in the paper. The researchers characterized the folklore as, in effect, “a superstition attributed to the illusory correlation between the two events.”
Orihara had hoped for the opposite. “We thought that if we could understand the connection, it would be useful for disaster prevention,” he told the Kyodo news agency — adding, in the same breath, that it had been disappointing to find no correlation. He was not the only one to check, either. Zoologist Rachel Grant of London South Bank University, who had spent years studying whether odd animal behavior precedes earthquakes, also analyzed oarfish sightings over roughly the past century, in parallel with the Japanese team. Both projects reached the same conclusion: earthquakes and oarfish behavior are not related.
So the folklore was tested against more than eight decades of data, by two independent lines of inquiry, using a method designed to give the legend every chance to be right — generous time windows, generous distances, all the big quakes included. It failed the test almost completely.
Why It Feels True Anyway
If the evidence is that decisive, why does the claim keep coming back to life every time a twelve-foot fish shows up on a beach? Because the human brain is not a spreadsheet, and the myth is built to exploit the ways our minds shortcut.
The first shortcut is selective memory. A 2018 analysis published in the journal Fish and Fisheries reviewed the literature on marine “omens,” including oarfish episodes, and found no evidence of a direct, consistent connection with earthquakes. What it found instead was a memory trick: people remember the cases where a stranding happened to precede a quake, and quietly forget the far more numerous cases where an oarfish washed up and absolutely nothing happened afterward. The hundreds of strandings with no earthquake attached do not make headlines. The one that does becomes the whole story.
Grant’s earlier work on frogs makes the same point from another angle. Studying reports of frog swarms — mass migrations of juvenile frogs that are sometimes read as earthquake omens in China — she and a coauthor traced the records back to 1850 and crunched the numbers. “There is no link between frog swarms and earthquakes,” they reported. Her advice for anyone reading omens into animal behavior applies directly to the oarfish: the important thing, she said, is understanding “what is really unusual behavior, and what is normal behavior” — because rare events we happen to witness feel meaningful even when they are ordinary.
The second shortcut is the base-rate problem. Consider that spooky 2024 sequence again: an oarfish at La Jolla on a Saturday, a magnitude 4.4 quake a couple of days later. Eerie — until you remember that Southern California experiences thousands of small earthquakes every year. In one of the most seismically active regions on the planet, a magnitude 4.4 will eventually occur within a few days of almost any random event: a celebrity wedding, a heat wave, a twelve-foot fish. Coincidence is not causation, and in California, coincidence has abundant raw material to work with.
The third is the incentive structure of viral news. A photo of a dead sea serpent will always outperform a marine biologist explaining statistical independence. Each stranding becomes content, each headline revives the question, and each revival feels like fresh confirmation — “they’re asking again, so there must be something to it.” The myth is self-replenishing: rarity makes the sightings newsworthy, newsworthiness makes the folklore travel, and the folklore makes the next sighting ominous.
There is also a quiet irony in the La Jolla story itself. The very people who recovered the fish were, in a sense, the ideal witnesses — science-minded kayakers and snorkelers who did exactly the right thing, towing the specimen to shore so researchers could study it. The specimen joined one of the world’s great marine collections and is still teaching scientists about oarfish biology, anatomy, and genomics. The omen narrative was layered on afterward by the attention economy, not by anyone who handled the fish.
Could Any Mechanism Possibly Work?
Fairness demands one more question: even if the statistics say no, is there any plausible biology that could rescue the claim? Scientists who have looked at it are careful here. Some researchers acknowledge that marine animals might be sensitive to physical or chemical shifts in their environment — changes in pressure, electromagnetic fields, or water chemistry. Animals can detect things humans cannot.
But the leap from “a fish might sense some environmental change” to “this fish reliably predicts earthquakes” is enormous, and the evidence does not make it. As scientists reviewing the sightings have noted, there is simply not enough data to rigorously link oarfish behavior to the dynamics of tectonic plates. The current consensus is that a surface oarfish is responding to immediate, local factors — its own failing health, rough weather, shifting currents and temperatures — not to deep geological processes.
And again, the animal’s actual ecology works against the story. Oarfish drift in the water column far above the seafloor. Whatever faint signals might precede a rupture at a plate boundary would have to travel up through hundreds of feet of water and be correctly interpreted by a mid-water filter feeder — while the same fish routinely surfaces, dead or dying, from plain old sickness. A warning system that fires mostly when the fish is ill, and stays silent before the biggest quakes on record, is not a warning system at all.
The Verdict
False. The claim that oarfish sightings predict earthquakes does not survive contact with the evidence.
The folklore is genuine and centuries old — Japan really did call this fish the messenger from the sea god’s palace, and the anxiety that follows each stranding is understandable. But when researchers put the claim to the only test that matters, comparing 336 deep-sea fish appearances against 221 large earthquakes across 83 years, they found essentially no relationship: one plausible coincidence, zero fish before any magnitude 7.0 quake, and zero magnitude 6.0 quakes within ten days of an appearance. An independent parallel analysis reached the same conclusion. The mechanism fails too: the oarfish is a sickly mid-water animal, not a seafloor sentinel, and experts say strandings are explained by poor health, currents, and ocean conditions.
The sightings are real. The wonder is real. The prediction is not.
A Wonder That Needs No Omen
Here is the thing the doomsday framing steals from us. The giant oarfish does not need to predict the future to be astonishing. It is the longest bony fish known to science, a silver ribbon up to thirty-six feet long, drifting vertically through the ocean’s twilight zone, straining plankton from the dark with a crown of red fin rays. Fewer than two dozen have been seen off California in a century and a quarter. Each one that reaches a laboratory is a small scientific event — a necropsy, a genome, a preserved specimen that will be studied for decades.
It probably did inspire the sea-serpent stories of old sailors, and there is nothing wrong with that. The ocean is allowed its monsters, real and imagined. But when the next twelve-footer washes up — and one will — the honest headline is not a warning. It is an invitation: look at this impossible animal, learn what it can teach us, and leave the earthquake forecasting to the seismometers. The fish has enough to do just being itself.
