Nature
PUBLISHED
13
A diver exploring California’s Monterey Bay was recently treated to a phenomenally rare encounter with a normally deep-sea-dwelling creature, having spotted a juvenile king-of-the-salmon (Trachipterus altivelis) swimming in waters near the surface.
To say this is rare isn’t an overstatement; the king-of-the-salmon is typically found far from shore and at significant depths that can extend all the way to 900 meters (2,953 feet), putting it firmly in the category of bizarre beasties found in the twilight zone – not somewhere we humans tend to hang out.
However, Ted Judah, who regularly goes on diving trips with his wife, spotted this particular fish off McAbee Beach on December 30 at only around 4.6 meters (15 feet) under the surface.
“[T]he water was so clear that I elected [to] scan around below as I kicked out and I'm glad I did,” Judah wrote in a Facebook post. “I saw this silvery knife blade undulating thing in only about 15 feet of water moving west parallel to shore. I said to my wife, ‘There's something amazing here.’”
.jpg "diver swimming alongside a King-of-the-salmon (Trachipterus altivelis)")
“I wanted to stay with it but I felt like I was harassing it. It had this keen ability to orient itself so that [its] narrowest profile was always facing me. I'd try to swim [alongside] to get the profile and it would rotate away from me,” he added. “I am so honored to see it.”
Judah also posted images of the fish in the hopes that someone could help to identify it, having queried whether it could’ve been a juvenile oarfish – also known as the “doomsday fish”, another deep-sea creature.
Luckily for Judah, it turned out there was a Monterey Bay Aquarium marine biologist in the comments. Kevin Lewand, a senior collector who has been with the aquarium for 25 years, shared the post with Californian ichthyologists (the fancy name for fish biologists), who concluded it was a juvenile king-of-the-salmon, and only the second one seen in 2025.
While both are ribbon-like in appearance, king-of-the-salmon and oarfish belong to different scientific families.
But even when Judah’s spot was successfully identified, others in the comments still had questions – mainly, why on Earth is it called king-of-the-salmon? A fair question, considering it’s, well, not actually a salmon.
Unlike the earthquake-triggering legends surrounding the doomsday fish, the king-of-the salmon’s name has more positive origins. According to a video from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), it was given its name by the Makah, an Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast, who believe the rarely seen fish leads salmon back to their spawning grounds.
Kingly indeed.
