A Lifer Sculpin and No Snakes

Today (Thursday) my mother and I headed to Rhode Island with the objective of looking for a very hard to find snake. Smooth green snakes had a naturally spotty range made even more spotty by urban sprawl. Although they are still abundant in a handful of locales they are lacking in numbers overall. And as if being rare weren't enough, their habitat and behavior make them even harder to find and photograph. They are wicked fast, like hanging out in vegetation the same color they are, and don't sit still when handled. The best way to find them in a good scenario for photography is by lifting board and bark and rocks. Though the area my mom and I searched was great habitat (and we covered a lot of it), we failed to find either a basking snake or anything really ideal to lift that one would like hiding under. I heard a number of things make a break for it in the brush, but what those things were I will never know. One was certainly some kind of snake.

A coyote raided turtle nest.

So, we skunked out. No snakes! But it would be silly not to have a backup plan, and I did. We paid a visit to a favorite breachway of mine after lunch and I targeted micros. At first I was after rock gunnels. It just wasn't happening the tide was too high to fish the places I wanted to, and the bergalls kept getting in the way. 

Then, wading through some sandy areas, I noticed I was spooking a bunch of little flatfish. Some were definitely juvenile summer flounder, the rest were hogchoker. I started targeting them, which was very, very frustrating. These little flat fish may turn out to be extremely hard for me to add to my lifelist. I eventually had to call it quits and head back towards the car. But I did decide to walk along the edge of the breachway instead of the road on the way there. I found some more hogchokers hanging around a few rocks, but in trying to catch them, I ended up catching something very different. I saw come out from under a weed covered rock a pair of very stout fish with big heads and mottled coloration. They were clearly sculpins of some sort. And, true to the ravenous nature of many sculpins, they pounced on my tiny tanago hook fly. I hooked it and immediately lifted it's incredibly minuscule body out of the water. My heartbeat increased rapidly as I carefully waded back to dry land, worrying all the way that the fish would free itself, knowing full well this could only be a new species no matter what sculpin it turned out to be. I quickly got it into the photo-tank, before which time it did indeed throw the hook, and got as many photos as I could. Then I went back out and tried to get the other one, which was bigger. I did, and I got it safely into the photo tank too, where I was lucky enough to get one key photo, though I didn't know that until I got home. These are the results from both fish:

Specimen #1

Specimen #2

Now, for the aforementioned key photo of the larger of the two sculpins: 

Why, you are probably asking, is this the key photo? It is a bit less well focused than the rest and doesn't seem to show some key parts of the fish in any detail. 

Well, it shows one specific part of the fish in enough clarity for me to confidently identify the species. These two fish could only really have been either shorthorned sculpins or little sculpins, also called grubbies. It was much more likely that they were grubbies because they are more common than shorthorned south of Cape Cod Bay, and shorthorned sculpins are rarely in very shallow water in the summer up north. So it would stand to reason that in Southern New England in a spot with water temperatures just above 60 degrees, these would most likely be grubbies. But weirder things have happened in this spot than a shorthorned sculpin showing up in late June... just 25 yards away, I'd caught a barrelfish on the fly... so it could go either way. Except I got a good enough shot of the larger specimens anal fin with rays extended to get a count of 10. 

Grubbies have 10 or 11 anal fin rays, shorthorned sculpins have 13 or 14. 

So, life list fish #133 for me is the little sculpin. It had been far too long since I got a new fish to add to the list. What a relief! Only 17 to go before I reach my year end goal of 150. 

Lifelist fish # 133, little sculpin/grubby, Myoxocephalus aenaeus. Rank: species

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