Cape Town Team Rescues Record One-Ton Sunfish on New Year’s Day

There are worse ways to spend New Year’s Day than assembling a makeshift crane platform from wooden pallets and scaffolding, waist-deep in a draining dry dock, coaxing a one-ton fish onto what amounts to an industrial stretcher. Ask the skeleton crew from Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation. They’ll tell you it beat their hangovers.

The call came on New Year’s Eve. Martine Viljoen, the Foundation’s Marine Wildlife Manager, was probably hoping for a quiet end to 2025 when her phone lit up with Dock Master Johan Coetzee’s number. A sunfish had wandered into Sturrock Dry Dock at Cape Town’s Port of Cape Town and gotten itself spectacularly, inconveniently trapped. The dock was draining for maintenance. The fish was enormous, and the timing was terrible.

Viljoen made the call to halt the drainage, buying the animal a night’s reprieve in what little water remained. By 9:30 AM on January 1st, a motley rescue squad had assembled at the waterfront while marine wildlife specialists and staff members still shaking off the previous night. All of them staring down at what would become their biggest challenge to date.

The sunfish measured 2.32 meters nose to tail, 2.5 meters fin tip to fin tip, and weighed somewhere in the region of one metric ton. For context, that’s roughly the weight of a small car.

Ocean sunfish (Mola mola) are the world’s heaviest bony fish, which is a magnificently specific superlative. They’re also magnificently weird: all head and fins, looking like evolution quit halfway through the blueprint. Swimming heads, basically.

Engineering Chaos into Order

Here’s what you need to rescue a one-ton sunfish from a dry dock: A crane company with a heart, and a lot of prayers.

Everything had to be strong enough to hold a metric ton and gentle enough not to damage an animal that’s essentially a swimming water balloon. The engineering was part Maritime Rescue, part MacGyver.

The miracle came from Teemane Cranes. On a public holiday, when every reasonable business was closed and every reasonable person was nursing champagne regrets, they donated their crane and operator with no charge. Without that generosity, this story might end very differently.

The platform descended into the dock. The team guided the disoriented sunfish into position, monitoring its breathing the whole time, keeping water moving across those vital gills. Before the lift, researchers took quick measurements and snipped a tissue sample for an ongoing genetic study. Recent molecular work has revealed that what we’ve been calling “Mola mola” might actually be several distinct species, each with its own conservation story. Science marches on, even in dry docks on January 1st.

Then: the lift. Slowly. Carefully. One metric ton of vulnerable fish suspended in air, swinging over the dry dock wall toward open water on the other side. The kind of moment where everyone holds their breath and nobody makes jokes.

The platform touched water. Team members dove in immediately, untying restraints, swimming alongside the bewildered animal as it oriented itself. And then, with the anticlimactic grace of something that belongs in the ocean finally getting back to the ocean, it swam away.

“What a remarkable way to start the New Year,” Viljoen said later, with what I imagine was considerable understatement. “With collaboration for conservation.”

The Invisible Crisis

The uncomfortable part was that this fish got lucky. Absurdly lucky.

Most sunfish that encounter humans don’t get rescue teams and donated cranes. They get trawl nets. Drift nets. Longlines. Over 340,000 sunfish are killed annually as bycatch in South African waters alone. In some Mediterranean swordfish fisheries, sunfish can comprise 93 percent of the catch by number. Yup, 93 percent. The actual target species becomes the bycatch.

The Cape horse mackerel midwater trawl fishery off South Africa? Sunfish make up 51 percent of all bycatch. California’s drift gillnet operations catch them at rates that outnumber swordfish. They’re not targeted. They’re not wanted. They’re just… there. In the way.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature recently bumped Mola mola to Vulnerable status. The reasons are depressingly straightforward: bycatch mortality is staggering, and localized populations are crashing. Worse, we’re disrupting an ecological role we barely understand in the first place.

Because here’s what we do know: sunfish eat jellyfish. Prodigious amounts of jellyfish. Conservative estimates suggest northeast Atlantic populations alone consume upwards of 2,600 tonnes of jellyfish daily during summer. They’re not specialized predators, either. Recent dietary studies reveal them as generalists with complex connections throughout coastal food webs, eating everything from small crustaceans to cnidarians depending on size and season.

Remove hundreds of thousands of these animals annually, and you’re not just killing fish. You’re pulling threads from an ecological tapestry we don’t fully comprehend yet. Disrupting predator-prey dynamics. Potentially triggering jellyfish blooms. We’re conducting an uncontrolled experiment, and we didn’t even mean to.

Why They Keep Showing Up

Every year between October and June, sunfish appear in Cape Town’s harbours with clockwork regularity. V&A Waterfront. Simonstown. When storms churn the ocean into chaos, these pelagic wanderers seek calm water and sometimes find themselves in harbour basins they can’t navigate out of.

The Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation responds to every call. “We always respond to these calls and try to assist where possible,” says Claire Taylor, the Foundation’s Interactive Exhibits & Marine Animal Welfare Specialist. Which is how you end up with a track record of sunfish rescues, each one adding data to citizen science initiatives tracking distribution patterns along the coastline.

If you spot a sunfish, the Foundation wants to know. WhatsApp (076 092 8573) or email (sightings@aquariumfoundation.org.za). Send photos, GPS coordinates, date, time, behavior. Every sighting helps map presence, movement, maybe even species differentiation as molecular techniques improve.

What Remains

Somewhere in Cape Town’s waters, the sunfish is swimming. Eating jellyfish. Doing whatever one-ton swimming heads do. The tissue sample will go to genetic research. The measurements will add to the database.

On New Year’s Eve, Dock Master Johan Coetzee could have let the drainage continue. Viljoen could have said it was impossible. Teemane Cranes could have stayed closed for the holiday. Any one of those decisions, and this story ends differently.

Instead, they showed up. Built something out of pallets and scaffolding. And made it work.

Written by: Junior Thanong Aiamkhophueng

Attribution: This article is based on information from the Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation press release and official communications regarding the January 1, 2026 sunfish rescue at Sturrock Dry Dock, Cape Town. Additional research context sourced from peer-reviewed studies on ocean sunfish (Mola mola) conservation, bycatch mortality, and ecological significance. Special thanks to Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation staff members and Dock Master Johan Coetzee for providing rescue photographs.

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