60 million times bigger

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 to weigh 60 millions times more, 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? Bigger? The size of a school bus? The size of three buses? Bigger? The size of an apartment building?

How about the weight of the Titanic! Imagine growing as big as a massive ocean liner!Impossible. I must be joking, right?

Actually, I am joking. If you grew 60 million times bigger, you would wouldn’t weigh the same as one Titanic—but FOUR TITANICS! You read that right: one, two, three, four Titanics!

If you started life as 7.5 pound baby and grew 60 million times bigger, you would weigh 430,000,000 pounds. Which is very, very big.