Friday Fish Time
Posted: August 10, 2012 Filed under: Friday Fish Time | Tags: Boxfish, Fishing, Great Australian Bight 1 Comment »
Common name: Rigid Boxfish. Scientific name: Caprichthys gymnura. Family: Ostraciidae.
Rigid Boxfish: I saw this picture in our scienceimage files and it just cracked me up. Looks like it is scared stiff! And as I read more it turns out it is scared for good reason.
(By the way – scienceimage is a great resource for science images.)
It grows to a maximum length of about 11cm and lives in water depths of between 40m to 200m. It lives in subtropical waters on the Continental Shelf in the eastern Indian Ocean along the southern WA and SA coasts.
There is not a lot know about these fish except they are mainly caught as a bycatch from trawler fishing in the Great Australian Bight. They are known to be fairly territorial so changes to their environment can have a great impact on them.
Sounds like more work needs to be done on their distribution, population and biology.
perhaps it is terrified by the impending “super trawler”.