Orange roughy, I believe. Looks like a big old one. Mike
Vecchione is guessing that, you know, this could be more than a
hundred years old, this fish. They aged one using otoliths at a
139 years old. Otoliths are calcium carbonate structures
located just behind the brain and their calcium carbonate is
deposited in layers such that when you look at them you can
actually see these rings. I'm not sure if they're annular or
subanular but the bottom line is, with some experience, you can
get some accurate ages on these fish and Mike Vecchione believes
they start reproducing at 30 years of age and there was
another study that showed that in this population the average
age of the breeding fish was 73 years. That's problematic with
a species that you'd want as a commercial fishery because if
you fish the large ones and it takes you know, 40 to 50 years
for them to start reproducing the healthy population again,
you can very quickly wipe out that population.