Concerns over the possibility of an earthquake have been growing since a giant scallop, known as an earthquake harbinger, was captured in Mexico.
According to foreign media such as the New York Post on the 10th (local time), on the 5th, an approximately 4m-long wild cuttlefish was caught off the coast of Sinaloa, Mexico.
The wild-tailed crocodile (Regalecus glesne) is the world’s longest bony fish, growing to an average length of 10 m. This fish is a deep-sea fish that lives at depths of 200 to 1000 m.
Earlier, in July of last year, in Arica, northern Chile, regarding 5m-long wild cutlass were also caught. Some see this as a harbinger of an impending earthquake. Chile and Mexico are seismically active and belong to the Pacific Rim seismic zone called the ‘Ring of Fire’.
In fact, in July 2020, in Alaska, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake occurred within a few days of the discovery of sangalchi, and in Mexico in the same year, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake occurred ten days following sangalchi appeared.
Even before the Great East Japan Earthquake that caused the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in 2011, a large number of wild cuttlefish were found in Japan. In Japan, there is a legend that hairtails, also known as ‘Ryugunotsukai’, come up from the Dragon Palace to warn of earthquakes and tsunamis.
On the other hand, the prevailing opinion is that these myths have no scientific basis. A research team led by Professor Yoshiaki Orihara of Japan in 2019 analyzed 221 large-scale earthquakes that occurred up to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. It was only once.
Instead, experts explain that the reason why wild cutlass are found on the coast is that ‘they came to the sea level to find food and then were swept away by the waves to the shore’. Professor Eo Jae-seon of the Department of Deep Ocean Mathematics at Kyungdong University explained to Yonhap News, “Deep-sea fish come to the surface to remove bacteria from the skin, to find food lacking in the deep sea, or to sunbathe.”
Ji-min Jang, Guest Reporter at Hankyung.com [email protected]
