Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Taking advantage of this behavior, we would squirt a dilute solution
of the fish anesthetic quinaldine into their daytime hiding place. They're
reluctant to come out of their hiding place into the bright daylight,
and if it was done slowly enough they'd be knocked out before they
realized what was happening. The result was sometimes a veritable rain
of upside-down, zonked-out, immobilized red squirrelfish (
Myripris-
tis occidentalis
), soldierfish (
Adioryx suborbitalis
), and cardinals (
Apogon
retrosella
). The trick then was to gather them quickly with a gloved hand
into the plastic bags before either they woke up or the morays grabbed
them for their lunch.
Soldierfish are much too spiny to use hand nets or bare hands on,
something we found out early on after spending five minutes untan-
gling one soldierfish from our hand net while all the others recovered
and swam away. An occasional unconscious soapfish (
Rypticus
spp
.
)
might drift out of a crevice with the others, but we learned the hard
way not to put a soapfish in a plastic bag with other fish. When irri-
tated—and we certainly did irritate them—soapfish can secrete a foamy,
toxic mucus that makes them unpalatable for a predator to eat. In the
close confines of a plastic bag, this mucus can kill everything in with
them. They are fine in a large aquarium with other fishes, just not when
trapped in a plastic bag.
All members of the wrasse family of fishes, like the beautiful rain-
bow wrasse (
Thalassoma lucasanum
), which is named for Cabo San Lu-
cas, and the green and orange sunset wrasse (
T. lutescens
), go to sleep
at night either beneath the sand or hidden in the coral or cracks in the
rocks. We developed a simple method for catching the rainbow and
sunset wrasses. It involved empty one-gallon, clear-glass mayonnaise
and pickle jars that we had collected before the trip from dumpsters
behind restaurants, and a few black sea urchins to use as bait. In ad-
dition, it relied on the fact that wrasses, which are very visual animals,
will not enter a space where they don't have a clear view of what's hap-
pening all around them.
Here is how it worked. In the shallow water that the wrasses inhabit,
near coral-encrusted rock reefs, we broke open a sea urchin, and the
feast began. Rainbow wrasses appeared out of nowhere and, fearlessly,
descended by the dozens on the free meal. We then broke open an-
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