Collecting the fish - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 229

One of the interesting aspects of the life of sheephead is that, like
many other members of the wrasse family, they begin life as females.
They have a harem system where a large male stakes out his territory.
Within that territory, all the other sheephead will be females. How-
ever, if anything happens to the male, the largest female will change
into a male. She will develop the hump on top of her head and change
from a dusky pink to the striking red, white, and black colors of the
male. Her ovaries will degenerate, and fully functional testes will be-
gin to develop. This drastic change in body shape, color, and function
can take place in as little as three or four weeks. As long as a large male
is present, however, the other sheephead remain as females.
Sheephead, with their stout canine teeth, feed primarily on hard-
shelled invertebrates like crustaceans and sea urchins. One of their fa-
vorite foods is lobster (which might be one reason lobsters come out
only at night, when the sheephead are sleeping ). Taking a stout rod,
Bob baited a hook with a good-sized chunk of fresh lobster tail that
he'd grabbed the night before in preparation for sheephead fishing.
Dropping it down through an opening in the kelp canopy, he kept the
bait a few feet o¤ the bottom and waited.
All of a sudden the clicker on the reel sounded the alert: something
had grabbed his bait and was making o¤ with it. Putting the reel in
gear, Bob pulled up hard and set the hook. He instantly knew he had
something big. It was an even match for a while as the strong fish
wrapped the line around a number of kelp plants. Bob slowly worked
the fish, together with a wad of kelp, to the surface, and we finally saw
what he had: a beautiful big male sheephead—just what we wanted.
Next we rendezvoused in a cove with the Just Love. Here Mark Shel-
ley, the underwater photographer with the video production company
Sea Studios, wanted to shoot some video to be used in an educational
piece on collecting for the aquarium. We found a number of small fe-
male sheephead, which, like the señoritas, we baited in with sea
urchins and then hand-netted. Swimming back to the boat after the
video shoot, I spotted some small ocean whitefish cruising just above
the sandy bottom of the cove. Back on board and out of our dive gear,
we dropped small baited hooks down and caught several. Although
not colorful, ocean whitefish have a delicate shape and graceful swim-