Florida: Hairy Fish

Have you eve caught a fish with a full head of hair? Me neither. But I have caught a fish so hairy that it's in the name.

Hairy blennies, Labrisomus nuchipinnis, are so named because they do look hairy. Little protrusions, like tiny catfish whiskers, cover the top of their head. The same features exist above each eye, looking like eye lashes. Their range span much of the western and eastern Atlantic and the Caribbean. They are quite abundant in the right habitat, living in the rocks and weeds, sitting in ambush most of the time, blending in with their surroundings. When they mate though, they color up so brightly it would make a brook trout blush. Males and females of the species both exhibit different coloration and physiology, which changes even more when they prepare to breed. The uneducated would be liable to assume that a spawning colored male, a spawning colored female, a normal colored male, and a normal colored female were each different species. Noah and I ended up catching probably close to 50 of them, all in non-spawning colors, and not one looked the same. The variation and size of some of them is much of the reason we put up with them for as long as we did. In fact, while we fished Sebastian Inlet, that was the only species we caught!

Aside from the blennies, the hoards of bait and lure fisherman flogging the water, and swimmers also basically flogging the water, there were a few sea turtles about. Being the herpetology nerd that I am seeing them put me in a good mood. I have a tendency to talk to any animals I meet in my adventures, but I'm far more likely to do so with turtles, snakes, and lizards than anything else. To me, they seem to have personality. What I would have most liked to have seen on this trip was a coral snake. I know, they are extremely dangerous. But they are just so handsome. Seeing sea turtles in the inlets was a nice consolation for the overall lack of snakes. 

There's only so many of one species I can catch in a day though before I want to move on. We continued south towards Jupiter. On the way we made one stop at the first place I had caught a snook on this trip. I decided to do a little exploring there and found a tiny ditch loaded with micros, some of them potentially new species. With light fading, Noah and I struggled to weed out something we hadn't yet caught. I did hook some sort of goby or darter that I lost. If it was a bigmouth sleeper, Noah needed it more than me. Otherwise, I have no clue what it was or if I'll ever see one again. I do know that nothing else I got there was new: bluegills, spotted sunfish, and mayan cichlids. Eventually we had to move on.

Cichlasoma urophthalmus

That night, our dinner was a very unique one. Something I never thought I'd do, merely because I wouldn't have thought to in most other scenarios. But that will be covered in the next post, as well as other important aspects of living out of a van in the swamp.