Category Archives: Fish

Orangeband surgeonfish shoal

This week’s Friendly Friday challenge theme is ‘Re-imagine Orange.’ See more responses here.

A shoal of orangeband surgeonfish is fun to see with their orange bands making them easy to identify and follow. For the purpose of this challenge, I took the photo below, desaturated the other colors, then boosted the orange to emphasize their defining feature. These changes virtually eliminated the other fish, particularly the yellow tang which went from bright focal points to almost invisible.

Arc-eye hawkfish and bleached coral

This is a typical pose for an arc-eye hawkfish, keeping very still as it nestles in a head of cauliflower coral. But the coral is not well. This patch is mostly bleached. The causes of coral bleaching include warmer than normal water temperatures, pollution, and sunscreens containing coral-killing ingredients.

Because of this third factor, Hawaii has passed a bill which will ban the sale of sunscreens containing oxybenzone and octinoxate. This law goes into effect January 1, 2021. While this will help, it won’t do anything to keep harmful chemicals out of water runoff, and it won’t do anything to prevent the warming of the Pacific Ocean.

Last fall, we had a coral bleaching event here because of warmer ocean temperatures. It wasn’t as bad as feared, but still did damage to corals that were just recovering from previous bleaching events. There are one or two snorkeling sites here that I don’t visit anymore because the state of the coral is just too depressing. I’d like to think that this degradation can be reversed but, honestly, I’m not optimistic about that.

Scrawled filefish in the wars

I noticed this scrawled filefish because it was catching the sunlight, as they sometimes do, and the blue scribbles on its side were beautifully illuminated.

The photo on the left is the first sighting I had of the fish, and as it dove I noticed something trailing it. This can just be seen below the tail. It looked like fishing line. So I followed it and got the top photo where I could clearly see that the fish was trying to dislodge a hook and line from its mouth. Not only that, but it had a good-sized slash in its side.

I had visions of trying to grab the line and remove the hook, but the fish kept going down, away from me and out of my reach. It disappeared from view and I was left only with the photos and the rather sad image of the struggling fish.