‘The sunfish is FINE.’ Wareham officials ask residents to ‘please stop calling’ - The Boston Globe

‘The sunfish is FINE.’ Wareham officials ask residents to ‘please stop calling’ - The Boston Globe

‘The sunfish is FINE.’ Wareham officials ask residents to ‘please stop calling’ - The Boston Globe

Posted: 13 Oct 2020 06:59 AM PDT

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To hammer the point home, the posting added: "PLEASE STOP CALLING THE POLICE DEPARTMENT ABOUT THIS SUNFISH!!"

According to Joshua Kimball, Wareham's natural resources officer, the Department of Natural Resources was contacted Monday morning about a possible injured seal in Broad Cove, a popular boating and swimming area.

Officers went out on the water to look but "located a flopping dorsal fin moving throughout the shoreline," Kimball said in a statement. It was a sunfish, a huge, strange-looking fish that gets its name because it likes to swim on its side to bask in the sun.

Sunfish — also referred to as Mola mola — are large bony fish that move slowly through the water, often near the surface. Their fins can be confused for those of a shark but are distinguishable by the way they flap back and forth, a motion caused by their swimming style.

This sunfish was not in distress and was swimming in 15 to 20 feet of water, so officers left it alone.

But for the remainder of the day, Kimball said, the sunfish stuck around, prompting multiple calls and e-mails from curious residents.

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"REPORTING LARGE BLACK FIN IN WATER LOOKING FROM RIVERSIDE DR ACROSS THE WATER. ITS NEXT TO 2 BOATS. ITS BEEN THERE AWHILE. ITS FLAPPING LIKE ITS IN TROUBLE," one person wrote in an urgent-sounding e-mail.

To let people know the fish was not in danger and to reduce the influx of calls, the department posted about it on its Facebook page, Kimball said. But in the end, the message seemed only to draw more attention to the situation.

More than a dozen people reacted to the humorous online missive posted by the department. By Tuesday morning, it had been shared nearly 100 times.

"So what your saying is . . . there is a big fish doing fish stuff in the ocean . . . thats Weird," one person wrote.

Others seemed tickled that the department had to address the situation at all: "This is pretty delightful. All of it. Good work," someone wrote.

For some, the Facebook post was a reminder of the 2015 video clip of Michael Bergin and Jay Foster, two Malden residents who had a brush with fame after they recorded their encounter with a sunfish in Boston Harbor.

In their video, which landed them an appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!," a confused Bergin referred to the sunfish he spotted as a "baby whale" and a "sea monstah" in a thick Boston accent.

"Dude call the aquarium," one person wrote beneath the department's Facebook post Monday, recalling a line from Bergin's video.

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Another chimed in, "Jay told me it's a baby whale. Send the coast guard please."

Steve Annear can be reached at steve.annear@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @steveannear.

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