Ocean Sunfish

Photo: Randy Puckett · CC BY-NC

Cape Douglas offers the most reliable Mola mola encounters in the Galapagos during the cold season, when Cromwell Current upwellings create dense thermoclines that these giants use as feeding and cleaning grounds. Multiple individuals are regularly encountered on a single dive, and unlike Darwin or Wolf where aggregations are dominated by large pelagics, Cape Douglas Mola encounters are often just off the reef in accessible depths. The open-ocean grotesqueness of these fish — their entire body a modified fin, their mouth a permanent O — makes every encounter deeply strange and memorable.