Sunday, March 29, 2009

Goatfish

Yups - we got pretty much every kind of fish that you think of. Boxfish, dogfish, goatfish - you name it.

The goatfish are really cool, in that they will poke around in small cracks and through the sane with these little "antennae" looking things that they have under there chins. When you have a school of them they can stir up quite a sand storm.

More info below...


Perhaps the goatfish's unpopularity among fishkeepers can be attributed to its feeding habits: Goatfish are tireless benthic feeders, using a pair of long chemosensory barbels ("whiskers") protruding from their chins to rifle through the sediments in search of a meal. Like goats, they seek anything edible; worms, crustaceans, molluscs and other small invertebrates are staples.

By day, many goatfish will form large inactive (non-feeding) schools: these aggregates may contain both conspecifics and heterospecifics. For example, the yellowfin goatfish (Mulloidichthys vanicolensis) of the Red Sea and Hawaii is often seen congregating with blue-striped snappers (Lutjanus kasmira). With such mixed company, the yellowfins will actually change their coloration to match that of the snappers.

All goatfish have the ability to change their coloration depending on their current activity. One notable example, the diurnal goldsaddle goatfish (Parupeneus cyclostomus) will change from a lemon-yellow to a pale cream whilst feeding. Diurnal species also tend to be solitary, but will school as juveniles.

I did not realize that they school during they day like that. I have seen it, but never realized they were just chillin' out. And yes they do change colors. Not fast, but look at them as a school of yellow goatfish like this video, and then look back and see a bunch of silver fish minute later!

I hadn't actually looked that closely, but if you watch the video (I'm a fish nerd, so I did it several times) and you can see several fusiliers that are naturally yellowish. The gotfish sort of tagged along pretending they are fusiliers! Pretty cool.

More info here....






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