Bird or Fish?

Today we went scuba diving at pleasure reef and spanki reef.  Both reefs we saw a lot of diversity and many different kinds of fish, sharks, and eels.  The one fish that really stuck out to me was the blue parrotfish!!!  These parrotfish are a very vibrant blue and they have these beaks that almost look like buck teeth.  They use these teeth to scrape algae off of rocks and corals and they even ingest these corals and rocks!!!  When they ingest these corals and rocks, they actually have more teeth in their throats that allow them to break up these corals/ rocks up into sand which they later eliminate. The sand that the blue parrotfish excretes helps contribute to the formation of sandy beaches in the Caribbean!!

Juvenile Blue Parrotfish

Blue Parrotfish

Like many other fish the blue parrotfish goes through color changes while growing into adult.  When the blue parrotfish is young, they have a yellow spot on their heads, but as they grow the spot goes away and they start to turn into a purple color, and then as adults they turn into the very vibrant blue color. These changes as growing aren’t as crazy as those of a stoplight parrotfish, but they still help us to identify around what stage in their life they are at.

Stoplight Parrotfish

The other fish that I saw a lot of almost every day was the stoplight parrotfish.  This fish gets its name because as they grow from the initial stage to their adult stage, they are many different colors.  When a stoplight parrotfish is born, they are all born as females, they start of as a dark brown color with white spots, and then going to a more colorful pattern with checkered scales, bright red fins, and a marbled head.  But that’s not all, they change again to even more colorful scales.  The matured female turns from a female to a male that has a blueish green head, bright green scales, and a large yellow spot above the gills.  That’s a lot of changing for one fish to go through!!

  

If you want to learn more about the different species of Parrotfish... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/group/parrotfish/

If you want to scuba dive and see some parrotfish... https://www.captainslate.com/