CRITTER: Schools of aweoweo showed up when King Kalakaua died

When diving in Hawaii you often can look into small caves in the reef and see the bright red aweoweo bigeye fish. These beautiful fish are normally seen by themselves and are easy to identify as their skin and eyes reflect light. The name aweoweo means “glowing red” like the caldera atop Mauna Loa. Red is also the royal color in old Hawaii and this fish is important to Hawaiian culture.

Newspapers reported huge schools of these red fish showing up in Pearl Harbor in January 1891 right when King Kalakaua died in San Francisco, and other reports of huge schools of aweoweo appeared prior to a king’s death, so large schools of this fish were thought to foretell the death of a chief. In more recent times large schools of aweoweo appeared off of Oahu and Kauai in 2002.

After doing over 3,000 dives in the Hawaiian Islands, I have never seen more than a few bigeye fish at the same time so observing a large school of hundreds of these fish seemed very unlikely, but it has happened in the past. Three weeks ago I came upon a school of 200 of more aweoweo hanging motionless in open water right above the reef, but this happened when we were diving in Palau, not Hawaii. Was something bad about to happen?

Aweoweo are usually bright red when they are in a cave because the red color is actually black when in the total darkness but when the fish comes out of the cave into the sunlight it turns silver. This huge school I found were all colors from red, pink to silver and they were totally tame.

I spent about 15 minutes right in the middle of the school, shooting video of this unusual event, when something happened which told me why they were there. The male aweoweo started releasing large volumes of white milky sperm and the females started releasing millions of eggs. They had all come together to broadcast spawn!

What is so fascinating about schooling aweoweo is that most fish species mass spawn every year at about the same time but this is not the case with the bigeye fish, which has only been recorded in these large schools several times over a 100-year period. It just goes to show how little we still know about the marine life that calls Hawaii home.

You can see my short movie I produced about the large school of aweoweo in Palau up on my YouTube channel at Underwater2web.

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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.