Last July I posted a photo of a young Achilles-goldrim tang hybrid. This fish looked a lot like a goldrim tang, but had the distinctive orange tail of an Achilles tang. I’ve recently been seeing juveniles that look a lot like Achilles tangs but lack the distinctive orange “thumb print” that is the basis for the common name of these fish. (This mark near the tang’s tail is supposedly reminiscent of the thumb print that Achilles’ mother Thetis left on his heel when she dipped him in the river Styx as an infant. You were awake for that in high school, right?) I had thought that maybe these were Achilles-goldrim hybrids with mostly achilles genes since they looked so much like Achilles but, like goldrims, lacked the thumb print. I was apparently wrong. Keoki Stender (marinelifephotography.com) shows that the very young Achilles tangs lack the thumb print, which gradually appears as the fish grows. Neither Hoover nor Randall (see the “about” section of this blog) mentions or illustrates this. Here are photos of both pre- and post-thumb print Achilles tangs taken the other day at Mahukona.
This little beauty is under three inches long, and lacks the distinctive achilles tang thumb print.
Same fish. I couldn’t decide which of these two photos to post so I’ve posted both. The blue eye ring and snout marking disappear as the fish ages.
This slightly older individual, photographed just a few yards away from the fish shown above, is a bit over three inches in length. The orange thumb print has replaced the blue eye ring
onebreathkohala 