 Good morning, John Vidkana's next week, so I'm super stressed out and not really able to concentrate on anything in particular. The nice thing, though, is that now I'm old and so I understand that this is happening and I know the solution. Very weird animals. Luckily, the internet is almost as good at sharing weird animals as it is at sharing celebrity drama and reality-destroying rage lies. I realized this recently while on Twitter and seeing this very good water anole. It looks silvery because it has a thin bubble that clings to its superhydrophobic skin. That bubble has oxygen diffusing into it and then it exhales into the bubble and inhales newly oxygenated air, thus allowing it to stay underwater for more than 15 minutes. So John, I'm gonna start every once in a while sharing with you a bizarre beast of some sort to ease my own mind and maybe make us all feel better about our lives on this beautiful danger ball. So let's start out with one of my faves, the Mola Mola, or the Ocean Sunfish. I love this fish so much. You may recognize them from this video. That thing is big, Jay. What is that thing? It looks hurt. Or this video game. We actually found the golden turtle! No! Whoa! Or from a viral Tumblr rant that I read from some Philistine claiming this thing is so worthless it doesn't realize it shouldn't exist. Look, you! That's not how this works. The various species of sunfish are successful and you know how I know that because they were doing just fine before we started accidentally ripping them out of the ocean with the rest of our fish catch. And throwing a bunch of indigestible trash that looks exactly like their favorite food into the ocean. Yeah, they eat jellyfish, which is also the favorite food of a lot of sea turtles, which made me think if there's some convergent evolution going on here because when you turn a Mola Mola on its side, it kind of has a very similar swimming style to a sea turtle. Almost as if there is a good reason for this ridiculous shape. And yes, I recognize that they look dumb. In Taiwan, they call them the fish that looks like a toppled car and the Polish name for them is basically just a head, which, yeah, I see it. But just because it looks funny doesn't mean it's not a good fish, brunt! They are the biggest of the bony fishes and they get very, very big, up to about a thousand kilograms. Up until recently, we actually assumed from their lack of swim bladders and their very weird fins that they were themselves a kind of plankton, that they would just go wherever the ocean currents would take them. Except it turns out they can actually swim pretty fast. In fact, the only people who have ever been hurt by sunfish were hurt when sunfish jumped out of the water and into a boat. But that's when they're relatively young. When they're less young, they are not very fat. They're pretty slow. But because they don't need to be fast because they're so big and they have fecundity proportionate to their size, a female adult sunfish can lay up to 300, wait for it, million eggs. For clarity, that is more than the entire world population of adult sunfish. Sunfish are called sunfish because they sun themselves. They lay flat on the water, either to warm themselves up so that they can go back down deep and get cold again, or because they want seagulls to come and peck worms off their side. Maybe both, maybe neither. But weirdly, baby sunfish also kind of look like suns with, you know, like a super gross eyeball inside of them. And they grow extremely fast. The Monterey Bay Aquarium had a sunfish for 15 months that grew from 50 pounds to almost 900 pounds. It was so big they couldn't fit it in the tank anymore, so they had to airlift it by helicopter to freedom. From birth to adulthood, Mola Mola increase in mass by more than 60 million times. And John, their skeletons look like very dangerous spaceships. Yeah, I get it. Other animals are cute and fuzzy and they look like they're smiling at you. And Mola Mola have their big terrified eyes locked into a bumpy head and can't fully close their mouths and have huge amounts of parasites both in and around them. But we have no idea what's going on in that big dopey head body. And I just want all of the Mola Mola in the world to know I love you. You're doing great. Keep being lumpy and magnificent. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.