A huge, ribbon-shaped sea creature dubbed the "doomsday fish" for its reputed ability to portend natural disasters was found floating off the California coast — two days before an earthquake struck Los Angeles.
A group of kayakers and snorkelers encountered the dead, 12-foot oarfish in La Jolla Cove, north of downtown San Diego, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The disturbing discovery marked only the 20th time an oarfish has washed up in California since 1901, the institution said Wednesday on Facebook.
The Saturday find also came two days before an 4.4. magnitude earthquake centered near the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles shook the city and was felt north of Bakersfield and south of San Diego.
More than a decade ago, 20 oarfish were reportedly found washed up on Japanese beaches in the months leading to the magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the coast of Honshu that triggered a tsunami on March 11, 2011.
Monster waves as high as 130 feet swamped more than 1,200 miles of Japan's Pacific coast, killing more than 18,000 people and causing a major nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
But a 2019 study found no correlation between oarfish strandings and earthquakes in Japan, according to the Scripps Institution.
Oarfish live in very deep waters and can grow more than 30 feet long, and are usually only spotted near they surface if they're disoriented, sick or dying, according to the Ocean Conservancy.
The specimen found last week will undergo a necropsy to try to determine its cause of death, after which it will be housed in the Scripps Marine Vertebrate Collection at the University of California at San Diego.
