Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
other urchin and popped it inside the glass jar. Soon one fish summoned
up enough courage to venture inside for the tempting snack. The oth-
ers saw it eating and they rushed in as well. At that point we slammed
the lid over the jar mouth, and we had our wrasses. The jar of frantic
fish was then taken ten or fifteen feet up to the boat overhead and poured
into the waiting plastic trash cans we use for holding fish. This was re-
peated until we had a couple of hundred wrasses.
We held the wrasses in sand-bottomed tanks on the mother boat. At
night they'd disappear from view with just the tips of their mouths pro-
truding from the substrate so they could breathe. They don't do well
if they have to sleep in a tank with a hard, bare bottom or in a rough
net receiver. Other aquarists have built clear-acrylic traps with hinged
doors and tapered-entrance funnels, which are elaborate and expen-
sive works-of-art, but I think plain old pickle jars plus the ability to
read the fish's behavior outproduce the complicated acrylic traps. Un-
fortunately, modern petroleum-based technology has made it hard on
us low-tech collectors: it's impossible to find one-gallon glass jars any-
more; everything now comes in opaque plastic, which is no good for
catching fish.
Y ELLOWTAIL SURGEON ROUNDUP
One of the most striking sights in southern Baja California is a school
of large yellowtail surgeonfish (
Prionurus punctatus
) cruising over a
rocky reef. Through trial—and some error—we developed an interest-
ing method of capturing these fish.
Locating an area where they habitually cruise, we stretched a one-
hundred-foot-long, ten-foot-high barrier net perpendicular out from
the rocky shore. Fairly soon, a school of twenty to fifty surgeons would
come moseying along the reef, grazing on algae. Pretending they were
the last thing on our minds, we'd casually swim around behind them,
and then Kelly McColloch, Bob Kiwala, and I would slowly herd them
like grazing sheep toward the net. As soon as they saw the barrier they'd
turn to double back, but we were blocking their path. Then things would
get wild. As the three of us rushed at them, frantically waving our out-
stretched arms, the fish would panic. The smart ones managed to shoot
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