Last Saturday Scout Burns posted on Facebook about her hatred of the sunfish (otherwise known as Mola mola) and it went super viral.
The rant – which you've probably seen if you spend much time on Facebook – listed myriad reasons why the sunfish is actually "the biggest joke played on Earth".
They included: the sunfish's "useless" heavy body which can weigh up to 2,250kg (5,000 pounds), their lack of swim bladders (which fish generally need to control their buoyancy so that they don't rise to the ocean's surface), and the fact that they're not even considered food by predators, which instead choose to chew off their fins to play with, for fun.
For the record, here's some footage of a sunfish. As you can see, they're... certainly something.
Burns' rant on the "worthless" sunfish was shared almost 75,000 times and has almost 70,000 likes on Facebook.
The comment section was full of people applauding Burns, and a few even said that she had changed their minds on sunfish.
Twitter got seriously passionate about sunfish too.
In other news, the highlight of my morning was a rant about how fundamentally usless sunfish are.
This rant on why Ocean Sunfish are the absolute useless fish species EVER has me in fUCKING TEARS 😂 OP is a GIFT 🙌🏽… https://t.co/jBn1HIHBcM
i luv that post thats jus t. a longass rant abt all the reasons ocean sunfish are terrible. bc i agree. also they creep me out
The rant post about the Sunfish offends me as a biologist
And Tumblr also erupted – both with praise and damnation – over Burns' hatred of sunfish.
Then someone changed the sunfish Wikipedia page to say millions of sunfish had voted for Donald Trump.
And, uh... someone made this too.
However, not everyone was thrilled with Burns' shutdown of the sunfish. David Masad, a computational social scientist, asked a marine biologist friend what they thought about the sunfish rant. The response is ... intense.
I asked a marine biologist friend about that ocean sunfish rant that's gone viral, and was not disappointed by the… https://t.co/wXaxMdreMM
"That dude [dude] has no idea what he's talking about!" begins the retort. According to the marine biologist, any animal that eats mainly jellyfish is helping the environment, because overfishing of the ocean has led to a huge increase in the amount of the squidgy jelly animals.
Then the whole rant is fact-checked. Sunfish aren't drifters, and are active swimmers, controlling where they go with as much thrust as a penguin. "Not bad for a 5,000 pound fish head with wings."
Also, a bunch of fish lack swim bladders, not just sunfish, which also have two sets of teeth (pretty cool). The final challenge relates to Burns calling sunfish "clueless as fuck."
"The fact that ocean sunfish utilise birds to rid them of parasites is actually quite clever," says the biologist. Sunfish have also been proven to have learning behaviours, meaning they can adapt to their surroundings (also smart)."
The biologist concludes by saying Burns is "just a hateful, ill-informed, little (especially when compared to a sunfish) man [sic]".
Oh, and there's also a RESOURCE LIST of sources.
BuzzFeed News has contacted Scout Burns for a response to this intense and elaborate shutdown.