A round transparent larva ringed with long spines, the pelagic stage of the ocean sunfishes.
A minute larva, usually well under a centimetre across, almost spherical and carrying a ring of long tapering spines that stand out from the body in every direction. The body is translucent with silvery pigment over the gut and a large dark eye, and there is no tail in the ordinary sense: the rear of the body is truncated, which is already the adult arrangement. The spines are outgrowths of scales and are lost progressively as the fish grows, so a larger juvenile of a few centimetres has short blunt points where the earlier animal had a corona.
The adults are among the heaviest bony fish in the sea, which makes the pelagic stage one of the largest changes in proportion in any vertebrate. Very little of the early life history is described from observation; most of what is known comes from net samples and from a small number of aquarium rearings.
On blackwater dives it is one of the animals that photographers work for and rarely find, and Anilao has produced more records than most sites. Family is as far as an identification can usually go, because the larvae of the several molid genera are similar and the material needed to separate them is not visible in the water.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
