An oddly shaped fish that local people did not recognise has been caught in fishermen's nets in the Bay of Bengal off Cox's Bazar and Kuakata. It came up on Sunday morning along with other marine species.

Its elongated body, small tube-like mouth and unusual build meant the fishermen could not identify the species at first. It was later established as a slender sunfish, Ranzania laevis.

Weighing about 2.7 kilograms, the fish was taken to an arat at the Mahipur fish landing centre in Patuakhali, where a crowd gathered to look at it. Because nobody recognised it, however, it went unsold in the end. Shahidul Islam, the sardar of Shahin Enterprise, the arat where it was landed, said the fishermen took the fish back out to sea.

Local people suspected it might be poisonous and therefore inedible. Apu Saha, senior fisheries officer of Kalapara upazila, said every marine fish or animal has its own rules for eating. "From squid to octopus, the processing is different for each. The sunfish also has a processing method. Follow it and this can be eaten too," he said.

Whether a fish is valuable, he added, depends on what people are used to eating. Bangladeshis do not eat slender sunfish, so in this context it has no value — though it might well be prized elsewhere. He said such rare fish reach the area occasionally, and once identified and sold they usually go to Dhaka, where five-star hotels have a demand for them.

International databases do not regard the species as dangerous. FishBase, the global database of fish species, describes the slender sunfish as harmless, and the IUCN's 2011 assessment lists it as of least concern.

According to the IUCN the species occurs in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. Its distribution map does not show the fish in the Bay of Bengal, but Bangladesh appears on the list of countries where it is found. Abul Hossain Raju, a local journalist, said fishermen told him that while many marine species turn up at Kuakata, this one never had before.

Source: BBC Bangla