After scuba diving and shooting video at Tunnels Beach one day I had a tourist come up to me and say she saw a clownfish out on the reef while snorkeling. I responded back and said that we do not have clownfish here in Hawaii and the movie Finding Nemo has led people to believe that every small red and white fish is a clownfish! She then asked me what the beautiful three inch brightly colored fish was and my answer was “more than likely a baby yellowtail coris known in Hawaii as hinalea ‘akilolo”. I tried to further explain that many of our reef fish look completely different as babies than what they look like as adults so trying to identify them is very difficult!
After scuba diving and shooting video at Tunnels Beach one day I had a tourist come up to me and say she saw a clownfish out on the reef while snorkeling. I responded back and said that we do not have clownfish here in Hawaii and the movie Finding Nemo has led people to believe that every small red and white fish is a clownfish! She then asked me what the beautiful three inch brightly colored fish was and my answer was “more than likely a baby yellowtail coris known in Hawaii as hinalea ‘akilolo”. I tried to further explain that many of our reef fish look completely different as babies than what they look like as adults so trying to identify them is very difficult!
Even today after 2000 scuba dives in Hawaiian waters as a trained marine biologist I see baby fish I cannot identify. Plus I see common adult fish like the nenue but have never seen a baby that I know of. I can’t even find a picture of a baby nenue anywhere and maybe they look completely different than the adults so we may be seeing them but do not know what they are. If you like to snorkel and you are having a hard time identifying baby fish then you are not alone because our reef fish have very complex colors and they may completely change colors five times from a baby to an adult. Some of our reef fish go down deep in the sea to reproduce so we may never see a baby because they live below where we can go while diving.
Our a’awa the Hogfish adult male is a grey color and the female is burnt orange and yellow but their babies are black with a yellow stripe. Trying to teach a tourist how to identify a’awa is just as hard trying to teach them how to pronounce their Hawaiian name correctly! The bottom line is don’t feel bad if you cannot identify every species of fish when you go diving. The Hawaiians had different names for each color phase of many reef fish as they grew and changed colors so I know they recognized the color changes but I am not sure if they actually knew that the different names were describing the same species. DNA testing has allowed us to know for sure that certain fish were the same species even though they looked totally different.
Why do our reef fish change color so often when they grow from a baby to adult? This mystery is just now being solved because there are so many people out in the water with cameras to document the fish and there are deep water rovers that are now viewing fish below 140 feet deep. What we do know is baby fish get eaten by predators including their own parents! The colors of a baby fish help them hide in the reef to avoid getting eaten. Red colors like the baby Yellowtail Coris help the fish hide in dark cracks of the reef because the red color is actually black when they are out of the sunlight. So a red fish with white bands is very hard to see in a dark cave and the alternating colors make the fish look much larger than it is which confuses a potential predator.
When the coris gets older and larger it has fewer predators and it is more interested in finding a mate and breeding then it is to hide so it develops bright colors to attract a mate. Each stage in the life of the fish may have a different color because the fish is living on a different part of the reef and behaving differently. Once we shoot enough pictures of each color phase and can document the fish that live part time in deeper water we can put the fish color change puzzle together and better educate people so they know what they are looking at when they go snorkeling!
You can see many of our reef fish color variations in my Koloa Landing marine life documentary movie at https://tgilinks.com/4dCxjC4
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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 Hawai‘i go to reefguardians.org
