These heat-exchanging blood vessels minimize the loss of body heat to the opah’s cold environment, ensuring a warm core body temperature, increasing muscle output and swimming capacity, and boosting eye and brain function. The constant flapping of its fins heats the opah’s body, speeding its metabolism, movement, and reaction times.Ībout the same size as a large automobile tire, the opah is equipped with specialized blood vessels that carry warm blood to its gills to rewarm the blood that cools as the fish breathes and absorbs oxygen from the water. Most fish living in the dark and chilly depths rely on ambush to catch their prey, but the agile opah is fast and efficient, flapping its bright red pectoral fins to race through the water. Its body temperature isn’t the only thing that makes this fish stand out from the rest in its environment.
Although not as warm as mammals and birds, the opah circulates heated blood throughout its body, giving it a competitive advantage in the cold ocean depths from 150 to 1,300 feet below the surface. In 2015, researchers with the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center revealed the opah, or moonfish, as the first fully warm-blooded fish.
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