CNN
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How to cheer up a lonely fish? This may sound like the start of a particularly silly joke, but staff at a Japanese aquarium faced a real challenge when they noticed their sunfish was sick.
Almost as soon as the Kaikyokan Aquarium in Shimonoseki, southern Japan, closed for renovations in December 2024, the sunfish fell ill, the aquarium said in an article on X.
“We couldn’t determine the cause and took various measures, but one of the staff members said: ‘Maybe he’s lonely because he misses visitors?’ We thought there was a 99% chance: “No way!” But we attached the staff members’ uniforms (to the tank)” hopefully, the aquarium said.
“And then… the next day, he was healthy again!
A photo released by the aquarium shows the sunfish swimming in its tank, one of its eyes turned toward makeshift “people” made from cardboard cutouts. faces and aquarium uniforms on hangers stuck to the glass. The staff also greeted the sunfish in an attempt to cheer him up.
A lone sunfish seems unlikely, the aquarium said, but added that this fish is curious and would swim up to the front of its tank whenever people came to visit.
But once visitors stopped coming, he stopped eating his jellyfish meals and began rubbing his body against the tank, leading staff to suspect he had developed digestive problems or was he was infected with parasites, Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun reported.
Ocean sunfish live in the open ocean in temperate and tropical regions around the world and have been found stranded in places as varied as Australia, California, Portugal, Spain and Oregon. They can grow to incredibly large sizes, weighing up to 1,900 kilograms (over 3,300 pounds) and measuring up to 3.3 meters (nearly 11 feet) long. This specimen in the aquarium is much smaller, but it shares the unbalanced, ball-shaped body and long fins that give the species such a distinctive appearance.
Another Japanese aquarium came up with a similarly creative solution for getting its animals used to human interaction. During the 2020 Covid lockdown, Tokyo’s Sumida Aquarium asked for volunteers to FaceTime its 300 spotted eels, which had become shy without visitors present, making it difficult for staff to monitor them and ensure they were safe. They were in good health.