Sea world and south - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 81

take over and descend to the eel tents. By now some of the eels were
partly out of their holes but not yet knocked out enough to remove.
The divers would squirt a little more quinaldine under each of the plas-
tic sheets and wait a few more minutes. Returning to the first sheet,
they could now collect the very groggy eels lying prone on the sand.
They would simply lift o¤ the tent and gently pull the eels out of their
burrows, placing them in plastic bags.
Because they're sand dwellers, like the wrasses the garden eels must
be held in tanks with a deep bed of sand for them to burrow in. They're
a challenge to collect but make a fascinating aquarium exhibit. Little
is known about their biology. How do they reproduce? Why do they
live in such large colonies, and how do they get there in the first place?
Now that a reliable method of collecting them has been developed, an-
swers to some of these questions may be learned in an aquarium.
OUTWITTING A CAGEY FISH
Another interesting fish we sometimes saw swimming over shallow
sandy areas was a species of wrasse called the razorfish ( Xyrichthys pavo ).
It gets its common name from the sharp edge to the front of its head.
We discovered the function of this sharpened head when we tried to
catch this fish with hand nets. Before we got within netting range, the
fish would dive into the sand and disappear. Digging right where it
had gone in was fruitless: the fish simply wasn't there. The sharp wedge-
shaped front of its head enables the fish literally to swim through the
sand and pop up some distance away.
Collecting the slippery razorfish by diving obviously wasn't going to
work, so Leo Navarro, a nondiver but an excellent fisherman, took on
the challenge of capturing this elusive animal. He took the ski¤, a hand
line of thin monofilament, some tiny hooks, and some fresh shrimp
for bait. He then spent hours peering over the side into the clear water,
maneuvering the baited hook near razorfish he spotted cruising over
the sandy bottom. His patience won out and he collected a number
of these attractive light-blue wrasses. We set them up in a tank with
sand so that, like other wrasses, they'd have a place to sleep at night.