Category Archives: Fish

Black-crowned night heron catches a fish

This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘For the Birds.’ See more offerings here.

Bird baths and bird feeders are a couple of subjects for this theme and these photos are of what is, in effect, a bird feeder. It’s a fish pond at Hualalai Resort and where there’s a fish pond, there will likely be herons. I saw half a dozen perched around one of the ponds there, but this adult black-crowned night heron was the only one I saw catch anything.

It lunged its beak into the water and pulled this good-sized fish out onto the bank. After a few minutes of tossing the fish around to get it lined up properly, the bird swallowed it whole. The photo at right shows the fish on its way down.

Black triggerfish

Black triggerfish are one of the most common fish on the reef, at least in certain areas. They are unremarkable in appearance being mostly black with bright, pale blue lines at the base of the dorsal and anal fins (top photo).

They are usually seen in large groups, moving through the water as they feed on plankton and algae (middle photo).

But when they’re agitated, bright blue lines radiate from around the eye. The more agitated, the more coloration, until they can appear like the fish in the bottom photo, with blue-green lines over the whole body.

Abstracts: Yellowhead moray eel

At one of my regular snorkel spots, there’s a place where a small whitemouth eel had taken up residence. I saw it there several times, head sticking out from a hole in the rock, flashing its white mouth. Then one day it was gone, but there was clearly something else in there. It looked like another eel, but I only saw a smooth patch of skin, it was curled in there so tightly.

Recently though, I saw that the creature had turned around and, in the small opening, part of its head could be seen, revealing it to be a small yellowhead moray eel. In the photo, the eel’s eye peers out from its lair, which is surrounded by rock covered with different-colored growths.

Cleaning a barracuda

A small cleaner wrasse works at removing parasites, dead tissue and mucus from a great barracuda. The service they provide is recognized by larger potential predators, which don’t harm these little blue and yellow fish, even when they go inside the mouth to clean.

Great barracudas are generally mostly silver with black marks on the tail fins and second dorsal fins. However, some great barracudas, such as this one, have black marks on other fins and their silvery sides are mottled with darker markings.

Yellow chub and orangespine unicornfish

The yellow chub in this photo is actually a gray chub, but a few individuals, such as this one, can be yellow, white, or multicolored. This one is something of a regular at one spot on the North Kohala coast.

The orangespine unicornfish is seen in many places along the coast and always has a grumpy look. In this case, it looks like it’s upset that the chub has swum into its territory.

Bigeye emperor

These quite large fish are commonly seen hanging in the water in small groups. When approached they will ease away without any apparent effort so that it’s difficult to get close enough for a good photo.

This one, however, displayed the same kind of curiosity chubs tend to have. It went by two or three times, clearly checking out the large, ungainly creature splashing around in the water, before deciding I wasn’t very interesting and moving away into deeper water.