Plural of fish is fish. Plural of fish is also fishes. When you’re talking about individual animals, it’s fish. Think Dr. Seuss, or better, think Jerome Kern: “Fish gotta swim…” Actually, Kern just wrote the music; lyrics were by Hammerstein, who also wrote the song invoked in this post’s title. (I think Coltrane, myself.) But when you’re talking about types of fish, the generally accepted plural is fishes. As in my guru John Hoover’s web site: hawaiisfishes.com.
Anyway, stream of consciousness pedantry aside, here it is 2018 and I’m still posting stuff from our November 2017 Bali trip. Can’t help it—Bali was so magical. So here are some favorites:
Everybody likes frogfish. So weird and so well camouflaged, seeing one always feels like winning a game. This is a Commerson’s or giant frogfish. I’ve seen them a handful of times in Hawaii, but never one as big as this one—it must have been a foot long—nestled into a purple sponge at around fifty feet at Menjangan.
Anthias are almost as common around coral heads in Bali as small damselfish are in Hawaii. This gorgeous fellow is a male threadfin anthias (singular and plural are the same). Hawaii also has a few anthias species, but they’re far less common than in Bali.
This photo illustrates why Bali is such a special place for fish geeks. There are four species here. From center left to right: male threadfin anthias, female threadfin anthias, blue-green chromis, male redfin anthias. Upper right is a lemon damselfish. (I think I got all that right.) This and the photo above were shot at about fifteen feet while snorkeling.
This is probably my very favorite fish, the titan triggerfish. Between the menacing, almost prehistoric look, size (this one is almost two feet long) and great coloration… This one went about its business crunching away at coral for several minutes while Marla watched and I clicked. We were snorkeling at Jemeluk.
Titan triggerfish have a reputation for aggressiveness, but their aggression is generally reserved for when they’re guarding their nests, which this one clearly was not. Our divemaster at Pemuteran showed us a nasty scar on his forearm where a titan had recently bitten him. (That’s a checkerboard wrasse trying to horn its way into the picture. These fish, like many of their relatives, often follow larger fish around hoping to pick up scraps.)
Even cooler looking and somewhat rarer than the titan is the clown triggerfish. I only saw a couple of these on our trip, both while diving at Menjangan Island. These fish are pretty big, too—maybe sixteen inches in this case.
A tiny juvenile canary wrasse, so yellow it pretty much overwhelmed the red channel on my camera’s sensor. I spotted this one at about fifty feet at Menjangan, to me the most special of spots in very special Bali.
Head shot of a pipefish—I don’t know what kind. Pipefish are close relatives of seahorses. These were pretty common in the seagrass beds around Pemuteran.
onebreathkohala 