Living Near the Ocean Floor, but Now Popping Up on the West Coast

For hundreds of years, a strange species of fish with long fanglike teeth that eats its own kind and spends most of its time at the bottom of the ocean has somehow found its way to the shores of the West Coast. Scientists aren’t sure why. The latest appearance by a lancetfish, as the species is known, was on a beach in Oregon, state officials said recently, prompting more speculation about why the deep-sea creature occasionally surfaces on land.

Lancetfish are obscure in part because they have no commercial appeal — meaning that they don’t taste good. The silvery and gelatinous fish have a scientific name that “translates to something like scaleless lizard or scaleless dragon,” and they look the part, said Elan Portner, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, one place where lancetfish have been found washed ashore. Lancetfish also “migrate as far north as subarctic areas like Alaska’s Bering Sea to feed,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Portner, who has been studying lancetfish for a decade, said the fish had been washing ashore “for at least 300 years and likely longer,” and like the Oregon officials, he said that “no one knows why.” One Twitter user said she had spotted a curious fish in Lincoln City, Oregon, at the end of last month, asking for help from “#FishTwitter” and “#DeepSeaTwitter” to identify it. Several users replied to suggest that it was a lancetfish.

Growing to more than 6 feet long, the species is one of the biggest to roam near the ocean floor, a habitat that is difficult and costly to study.

Benjamin Frable, a museum scientist and ichthyologist, or fish expert, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, offered some ideas for why lancetfish may wash ashore. They could have been chasing prey in shallower waters and gotten too close to shore. The fish are not very strong, he said, making it difficult for them to move away from the beach.

Oregon State Parks posted photos on social media of a lancetfish that the agency said had been found alive and which was “helped back into the ocean” and “swam off.” While noting that “no one is sure why they are washing ashore,” the park agency asked residents who find the fish to post photos and tag its account and that of NOAA Fisheries West Coast. — LAUREN McCARTHY/NYT