A second giant sunfish may have made an unscheduled landfall on the Hawke's Bay coastline.
Ten days ago, while enjoying a daily walk, Bay View resident Marion Choat came across a juvenile sunfish, about 1.5m long, washed up on the seafront.
The next day the fish, described as looking like a flat rugby ball with two rudders attached, disappeared with the tide.
On Wednesday afternoon, another Bay View resident, Jan Hartshorn, was taking a walk along the seafront toward the Westshore end of the beach when she, too, spotted a large and unusual fish washed up.
She recognised it as a sunfish - having seen a picture of the one Mrs Choat had come across on May 30.
"It was huge," she said, adding it did not appear to be the one found 10 days earlier.
"It looked all right - there were no signs of it having been eaten or decomposing."
It also looked larger.
Like the first sunfish, the outgoing tide also took away the second one.
Recent research into sunfish, which prefer warmer waters and are rare at this time of year, show that numbers have been on the decrease - due to littering.
A large chunk of the sunfish diet is jellyfish, and there had been a growing number of cases where they had been found to have eaten floating plastic bags, as they looked like jellyfish.
The fish would either choke while trying to swallow the bag or consume so many they would fill its stomach, causing it to eventually starve.
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