Visit the Kelpforest (pt. 2)

While she was sampling fish yesterday, DP noticed a few of these tiny tuna-like fish among the sardines. She brought a few of them back to identify because the fishermen were calling them wahoo, and she didn't think that was quite right. She thought they might have been bonito. We asked several people around the office, and they thought so too. They seemed to be shaped right, and the teeth were right, and the number of finlets, but what was throwing everyone off is that bonito are supposed to have oblique stripes along their backs. These did not have any, but they did have vertical bars all along their bodies. CK downstairs, an avid sportfisherman, went and got a copy of Western Outdoor Lies News that had very nice picture of a wahoo on the front cover (he had kept it because he got his picture in it with a bluefin he'd caught)- and VT and I decided these little guys were definitely not wahoo - the stripes were not quite the same, and they definitely did not have the sharply beaky face of a wahoo...


They were quite tiny, barely bigger than the juvenile sardines they were captured with.

The first one had faded a bit - on this one you can still see the bars pretty clearly, and the lack of oblique stripes.


However, finally I found this picture (on our own web page, no less - duh!), that does show a bonito with both vertical bars and oblique stripes.


(click to go to DFG Sportfish ID webpage)

Here's another I found with the vertical bars.

It's funny that any of the ID guides we used don't even mention them. Maybe they have the vertical bars when they're young, and develop the oblique lines as they get older? There are many juvenile fish that look completely different as adults. Maybe the fish in the last two photos are transitional - most pictures of bonito don't seem to have the vertical bars although a few others at Fishbase.org show vague ones.