Oarfish are a remarkable species. They live anywhere between 300 and 3,000 feet deep in the ocean. They grow up to thirty feet. Despite their large size, they feed on the smaller things they find, mostly plankton, shrimp and smaller fishes.

Because of the depth at which they live, they’re only really seen when they’re dead or dying, in which case they start to float toward the surface, or, in some cases, wash up on beaches.

Some consider their washed up bodies harbingers of doom.

Here’s what LiveScience has to say:

In traditional Japanese legend, oarfish were known as “ryugu no tsukai” meaning “the messenger from the sea dragon god’s palace.” People believed oarfish would come up from the deep to warn people when an earthquake was imminent. This myth caused a stir in 2011 when 20 oarfish washed ashore in the months before Japan was struck by the country’s most powerful earthquake.

While scientists say there’s no there there and disregard the folklore, the myths persist and, of course, it’s not just oarfish. Here’s a fun one from Atlas Obscura:

There are plenty of anecdotes about animals of all shapes and sizes acting oddly before earthquakes…

…In 2009, Grant was studying frogs at a site in Italy when they suddenly disappeared. Five days later, an earthquake hit. Afterward, the frogs returned. This phenomenon set Grant on a mission to discover whether certain animal behaviors actually signaled impending earthquakes. She focused on frog swarms, a natural synchronized mass migration of juvenile frogs that is sometimes seen as an omen of earthquakes in China. But when she and coauthor Hilary Conlan looked at reports from as far back as 1850 and crunched the numbers, the superstition didn’t hold up.

So what do we have to say about the three that recently washed ashore in California. As noted above, scientists only know of 19 that washed ashore in the previous 123 years. What gives?

In a statement, Ben Frable, manager of the Scripps Oceanography Marine Vertebrate Collection at UC San Diego, offered up a disappointing banality: changes in ocean conditions associated with El Niño and La Niña climate patterns that affect the tropical Pacific Ocean are also disorienting the oarfish.

Which, while probably true, we like to think it something stranger. Dare we say, fishier, even.