Actinopterygii · Tetraodontiformes
Ocean Sunfish
Mola mola
The heaviest bony fish alive, a nearly disc-shaped body lacking a true tail that can weigh over 2 tonnes, propelled by tall dorsal and anal fins beating in unison like a pair of wings.
- Realm
- Marine
- Conservation status
- VUVulnerable
This range is an occurrence-derived learning extent, not an official assessment range map. See the methodology page for the complete pipeline. GBIF.org occurrence density (GBIF Maps API v2) · 1° global raster; derived from GBIF per-cell occurrence density, vagrant-trimmed by a cumulative record-count threshold, morphologically closed, small-and-distant components pruned, clipped to a Natural Earth 1:110m realm mask.
Method and versionA sample of openly-licensed occurrence records retained after quality filtering. 1493 licence-filtered records across 83 1° cells, retrieved 2026-08-24.
Inspect on GBIFRetained datasets (11)
- Artportalen (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode)
- Digital video aerial surveys of seabirds and marine megafauna in the Gulf of Maine from May 2023 to January 2024 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode)
- Empire Wind Digital Aerial Wildlife Surveys for BOEM Lease Area OCS-A 0512, Empire Offshore Wind LLC, July 2024 to May 2025 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode)
- GBIF mediated dataset (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode)
- GBIF mediated dataset (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode)
- GBIF mediated dataset (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode)
- GBIF mediated dataset (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode)
- GBIF mediated dataset (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode)
- ICATMAR bottom trawl survey data in the Western Mediterranean (commercial and bycatch species) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode)
- iNaturalist research-grade observations (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode)
- PISCO fish transects (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode)