SHORT NOTES ON STRANGE CREATURES

Here you’ll find brief animal facts, odd sightings, and other weird tidbits from the natural world. Sometimes I’ll post facts about the creatures in my books. Sometimes I’ll post about creatures I’m currently fascinated by—maybe they will end up in a book one day. Do you have a question about a particular animal oddity? Ask me, and I’ll do my best to answer or I’ll find the expert to help us solve the mystery.

You can also sign up below to receive my Short Notes on Strange Creatures right to your inbox.

One of the strange creatures in my book The Strangest Thing in the Sea is the ocean sunfish, an extraordinary fish that looks like an enormous swimming fish head that can grow as big as an elephant. This is what an adult sunfish looks like. That’s a big fish head.

And this is what baby sunfish look like. Itsy bitsy. Teeny weeny.

As I mention in The Strangest Thing, baby sunfish start life smaller than a grain of rice and grow 60 million times bigger. That sound like a lot, but numbers are just numbers until you put them into perspective. So, let me put the ocean sunfish’s grow spurt into perspective.

If you started life as a human baby (which you did) and then grew 60 millions times bigger, you would be the size of . . .

Actually, I’m not going to tell you. I want you to guess. How big do you think you’d be?

The size of an elephant? The size of an apartment building? Bigger? The size of North America? Now I’m just being ridiculous, right?

How about TWICE THE SIZE OF EARTH!! No joke!

If you started out as an averaged-sized human baby (about 50 cm) and grew 60 million times bigger, you’d be a whopping 30,000 km big. Earth’s diameter is only 12,742 km, so you’d actually be as big as two Earth PLUS the Moon. Oh my. That’s big.