Those poor fish must have been wondering what the heck was happening to them.
The Oregon Parks and Recreation Department has reported that a section of a fiberglass boat 20 or 30 feet long was spotted off the state’s coast this week and has been towed into harbor.
The debris is suspected to be from the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011.
The boat fragment was found this week and towed to Newport, Oregon, where it is moored at a marina. Inside were found — more than four years and 4,000 miles later, if officials’ suspicions are correct — some specimens of a variety of yellowtail jack fish normally found in Japanese waters.
Biologists with the Oregon Coast Aquarium and Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center inspected the debris while it was still at sea and determined that the ecological threat posed by invasive species was small.
The remnants of the boat will be dried out, inspected further and taken to a landfill.
But for the yellowtail jack fish, the journey is not over. They’ll be taken to the Oregon Coast Aquarium.