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Thanks for all the responses so far. Several people have now told me that
it is an Opah - Lampris guttatus (Brunnich, 1788) - which is the name I got
from FishBase when using the keyword 'Opah'.

Opah

http://www.jswarbrick.karoo.net/fish_id/fish01.jpg

It was caught in the top 30 feet (10m) of a total depth of 15,000 feet
(4,573m) in the North Atlantic, 700km west of France. Water temperature was
21C.

The fins seem much longer and the body much rounder than the examples in
FishBase. Is this kind of variation to be expected, I wonder? Irrespective
of that, it certainly brightned my day when I saw it.

Here is the FishBase reference (remove any line breaks from the URL:

http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/SpeciesSummary.cfm?
genusname=Lampris&speciesname=guttatus


Regards

Julian Swarbrick

[log in to unmask]
www.seafish.co.uk

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