'Doomsday' Fish Turned Up Before Quake

A rarely seen deep-sea creature known as the oarfish seems to have lived up to its nickname as the "doomsday fish" in California. A group of kayakers and snorkelers came across a dead oarfish floating in La Jolla Cove in Southern California on Saturday, reports Fox5 San Diego. Two days later, a 4.4-magnitude quake rattled the Los Angeles area. The fish have acquired the nickname because they have a knack for washing up ahead of natural disasters and "are seen as being harbingers of bad news, particularly disasters or destruction," per the Ocean Conservancy.

However, whether the nickname has scientific validity is less clear because so little is known about them—this is only the 20th to wash ashore in California since 2001, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The fish can grow to a length of more than 30 feet, though the one in California was 10 to 12 feet, per CBS News. Wildlife researchers from the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center and the Scripps institution plan a necropsy on Friday to try to determine the cause of death. After that, the fish's remains will become part of the Scripps Marine Vertebrate Collection. (More fish stories.)