Rare 'doomsday fish' said to bring earthquakes spotted in California days before LA quake

Beachgoers in California recently found a rare, giant "doomsday fish" that folklore claims is linked to earthquakes. In a strange coincidence, the region then experienced a quake just two days later.

The 12-foot-long (3.7 meters) short-crested oarfish (Regalecus russellii) is only the 20th oarfish to wash up in California since 1901, according to a statement released by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. These fish live in the deep sea and are rarely seen by people. They also have a reputation in Japanese folklore as harbingers of disaster.

"There's this thought that they're a doomsday fish or a bad omen and that they seem to signal things like tsunamis or earthquakes," Zachary Heiple, a doctoral student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who helped recover the oarfish, told Live Science.

The oarfish washed up near San Diego on Aug. 10. On Aug. 12, a magnitude 4.4 earthquake hit Los Angeles. However, the two events are unlikely to be related.

Heiple pointed to a 2019 study published in the journal Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America that found any supposed link between oarfish sightings and earthquakes was pure superstition.

"There didn't really seem to be any correlation," Heiple said. "But it's a really interesting tidbit because it shows how oarfish and human History have interacted throughout time. "

Related: Gigantic sunfish that washed up on Oregon beach could be the largest of its species ever found