What a long, strange trip it’s been for a small striped fish native to Japan that apparently hitched a cross-Pacific ride in a small boat believed to be part of a tide of debris from that country’s March 2011 tsunami.
Washington state Fish and Wildlife Department biologists found five of the striped beakfish alive in a water-filled bait box on a 20-foot-long Japanese boat that washed ashore upright on March 22 at Long Beach in southwest Washington.
The Seaside Aquarium in Oregon has agreed to quarantine and exhibit one of the fish.
“It’s pretty cool. It’s about four inches long,” curator Keith Chandler says, noting that his staff dubbed it the “tsunami fish.”
