As a marine biologist it has been fun to try and get a picture and video clip of every known Hawaiian fish species that lives close to shore for my marine-life-education program. After 15 years and 3,000 scuba dives I have shot video of about 98% of the fish species that live at depths from a foot deep to 100 feet deep. But there were still a few species I have never seen before, so I was highly motivated to look for them.
It turns out the very-rare Tinkers butterfly-fish was observed by a local dive company out near Lehua and Ni‘ihau, so I set out to find one. Most of the Tinkers butterfly-fish are found off the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and I have never heard of one being found in the main Hawaiian Islands until recently. This butterfly-fish was only discovered in 1949 by Spencer Tinker, who was the head of the Waikiki Aquarium at the time. They discovered this super-rare fish by using a fish trap at 150 feet deep!
As scuba divers we cannot safely dive much deeper than about 125 feet deep, and even at those depths we can only stay down for a few minutes before we need to come back up into shallow water. Many fish species live below 150 feet deep, so I will never see them while scuba diving, but the Tinkers butterfly-fish was seen on one of the steep walls off Ni‘ihau at about 130 feet down. The water is so clear around Ni‘ihau and Lehua that you can see straight down over 300 feet in places.
It took me four long trips on the dive boats out to Ni‘ihau to finally see a Tinkers butterfly-fish, but it was down about 200 feet so I could not get a video of it. Ni‘ihau is a very unique dive site because it is surrounded by deep ocean currents, so it has all the shallow-water fish species but also the deep-water species. At 100 feet deep I looked down on several different dives at a pair of Tinkers butterfly-fish, but only watched them from a distance and was frustrated because I had spent so much time and effort to get a video of one but could not go down that deep!
While I was visiting one of the dive shops on the south side of Kaua‘i I was talking with one of the dive masters who leads dive tours out at Ni‘ihau, and he told me he knows a way of getting a video of the rare butterfly-fish, so I took his word for it and took the hour-long boat ride once again to Ni‘ihau.
On our very first dive the dive master told me to go down with him to about 110 feet deep and just sit still with my back to the wall. The dive master started scratching the algae off of the wall because that sometimes attracts fish to come check you out looking for an easy meal. Sure enough I saw a pair of Tinkers at about 150 feet down start to come up the wall. I had my bright video lights on and remained perfectly still. The pair of Tinkers butterfly-fish came from below all the way up to the dive master to see what all the scratching was all about. I was super excited, but was getting nervous about being that deep, as I only had a few seconds to get the shot. One of the Tinkers came right up in front of my video camera for a split second then turned around and went straight back down into the deep. Mission accomplished, as I got a nice video clip of this rare fish!
It will be really fun to find out if the Tinkers butterfly-fish are actually common, but live so deep we just don’t see them. We now have a drone submarine that is equipped with a 4K video camera and four bright lights, and we can lower the drone off of a boat all the way down to 300 feet deep. This summer we hope to shoot video with the drone on the deep water walls off Ni‘ihau and also other deep water walls on Kaua‘i North Shore like King’s Reef outside of Hanalei. If we find more of these rare butterfly-fish or other deep-water fish I will post some pictures on my Facebook and do a movie about them on my YouTube channel at Underwater2web.
Enjoy the picture of the five-inch-long Tinkers butterfly-fish, as this is the only picture I have!
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Terry Lilley is a marine biologist living in Hanalei Kaua‘i and co-founder of Reef Guardians Hawai‘i, a nonprofit on a mission to provide education and resources to protect the coral reef. To donate to Reef Guardians Hawaii go to www.reefguardianshawaii.org.
