The Hypnotic Power of a Sunfish Eyeball

A story by Tierney Thys, PhD.

Ocean sunfish, Mola mola

Only Tierney could get as excited about the eyeball of an ocean sunfish as most folks get upon seeing their first whale. She is a science media producer and communicator, but her specialty is the odd shaped fish known as the Mola mola. When a sea lion shows up next to her boat with a big, beautiful, but dead mola in its jaws, Tierney knows what she needs to do. Of course her spontaneity gets her in trouble, but sometimes the rewards are worth the price paid.

TIERNEY THYS wears many hats. She is a science media producer and communicator who is also engaged in multiple scientific research projects. The curiously shaped ocean sunfish is one of her signature marine projects. As Senior Editor, Tierney is currently putting together the first big academic book on the sunfish, featuring contributing authors from all over the world. Students will be able to read up on various study themes including reproduction, anatomy, locomotion, fisheries, and toxins, and each chapter will end with a list of scientific questions still needing to be answered. This will help focus students so they will be able to hit the ground running.

Tierney was born in San Leandro, California, but at the age of ten moved with her family to the teeny, land-locked town of Norwich, Vermont where she grew up.  She did her undergraduate work at Brown University in Rhode Island where she received a degree in biology. Following graduation, Tierney returned to California for several years where she worked for Sylvia Earle. Tierney then attended graduate school at Duke University in North Carolina and earned her doctorate in zoology investigating the mechanics of swimming muscles in fish, before returning to California again.

Tierney first visited Monterey when her sister attended boarding school in the area, well before the Monterey Bay Aquarium was built. She remembers Cannery Row, which was ultimately transformed into the Aquarium and neighboring shops, as a stinky place back then.

During her first year in graduate school, Tierney came and did research at the Aquarium, which was just getting ready to display ocean sunfish. She had already developed an interest in them, and the Aquarium had some in captivity that she could study. That was in the early 90s. Tierney worked with the sunfish for a semester, but couldn’t quite develop her efforts into a PhD project.

Following graduate school Tierney returned once more to Monterey. There she was involved in film-making at Sea Studios located next door to the Aquarium and was able to continue her unwavering interest in sunfish again. Tierney fell for them, as they are such an unusual fish. In graduate school she was studying biomechanics and looking at form and function, and looked at this odd-shaped fish and wondered why they had left their tales behind! Tierney describes them as an abridged oddity, a curtailed colossus. Yet, she says that when you see them swimming in the wild, they are just beautiful and graceful, a thing of majesty. They have this major contradiction – they look so cumbersome and yet they are so graceful. For the biomechanist, they were the perfect animal to study.

Concurrent with her ongoing research on sunfish, Tierney has spent ten years involved in filmmaking. Frustrated with the loss of whole biology courses at the university level where studies in mammalogy, entomology and the like have been replaced by genetics, she was happy to join the team at Sea Studios in making a documentary series aimed at reinvigorating interest in whole organism systems. The series, entitled Shape of Life, had 8 episodes—each one focused on a different phylum. The second series she worked on, Strange Days on Planet Earth, was about environmental issues from climate change to water borne pollutants. As Tierney notes, when you work in marine sciences you can’t turn a blind eye to the impacts we’re having on the planet. She has consequently gotten more and more interested in conservation and conservation messaging.

Tierney currently has several grants from National Geographic looking at how our brain responds to nature imagery and also the effects of offering nature imagery to nature-deprived populations, such as the incarcerated. She is exploring the question of how do we take the natural world that we’ve captured in our cameras and use it as a messaging tool to lessen our impacts.

You can watch Tierney’s story on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrfUWmwDGWI

THE HYPNOTIC POWER OF A SUNFISH EYEBALL

This was something that happened a couple of years ago. I was out doing a shoot for Animal Jam, which is an online video game-- a world where you become an animal to play. I am a Daily Explorer inside the game. When I started, we had a million registered players. Now the game is up to 180 million registered players, so it’s really popular. It’s like Club Penguin but aimed at 6-11 year olds. In the game, I have an aquarium where I can show videos and answer questions--kids’ questions – about the ocean and animals.

And I was out there doing a shoot on the bay, but I also work on ocean sunfish, it’s my primary study animal. I’m always keeping my eyes open for the sunfish.

So I’m there with my cameraman, Phillip Powell. I have all my expensive lavalier mic and my whole mic system, and this subadult California sea lion, I mean he’s huge, he comes up to the zodiac and he looks up, and he pulls his head up, and he has this huge sunfish in his mouth! And I’m like, ah!!

 But this is what happens to the sunfish that come into Monterey Bay. It’s usually the young of the year and the [sea lions] rip the fins off, and they fashion the fish into these perfect, little gray Frisbees. Then they toss them between themselves. And this is ultimate Frisbee, sea lion style. Super fun for the sea lions, not so fun for the sunfish, cause they end up (ultimately) dying.

The sea gulls peck their eyes out, and then they sink to the sea floor, and they get eaten by the sea stars, which is a really unceremonious way to die.

I saw one like face plant in an Urticina, a fish eating anemone. I mean if that’s not adding insult to injury, I don’t know what is. And so a self-respecting fish, a huge fish, being eaten by an anemone…..anyway.

So this sea lion, he shows me this big sunfish, it’s like he’s showing off right in front of the camera! And then, he drops it. At the time, I was collecting, I needed fresh eyeballs, because I was looking at the opsin genes in the sunfish eyes and I needed fresh eyes, and the sea lions were my perfect henchmen.  I didn’t want to have to kill a sunfish to get its eyeballs. I’d let the sea lions do my dirty work. And I get all sorts of samples from them.  You know, ripping the fins off, then the Molas wash up, and then I get to sample the fish without having to kill it.

 So this sea lion, he drops the fish. Momentarily. And he’s huge! And I’m like, “Oh look”, and the fish turns over and it’s got this one eye. Like the fish’s gonna die, and I couldn’t help myself, I just jumped in! I had all the expensive camera gear, all this stuff on me, lavalier, everything. And I jump in, and I get the fish, and I get the eyeball, and I’m so happy!!

 And meanwhile my camera guy is looking at me cause it’s actually his gear. And he’s horrified!!  And I said, “oh no!!” That was how I ended up paying about $600 for one sunfish fresh eyeball. (Laughter.) But it was worth it. I guess. (More laughter.)

 Science for the sake of the show. But I just had to get that eyeball. It’s really hard to get the eyeballs, you know, because when the sunfish wash up, it’s usually in the pelagic period, October, which is when a lot of the offshore species come in. The sunfish will wash up after the sea lions rip their fins off, and then if they’re fresh I can get all sorts of great tissues. But usually the sea gulls will come in and eat the eyes first, so you have to be there right when they wash up. But this time I’d gotten a really fresh, big eyeball. But I paid the price. (Laughter). So that’s my story.