Shortnose batfish have bright pink lips!
Sometimes with macro photography, you can get so zoomed in that it's hard to tell what you are even looking at. That is part of the fun of macro photography. Images can look even sharper than what your eye can see.
This is a photo of the face of a shortnose batfish. Let’s breakdown what you are looking at. The bright pink and red at the bottom center of the photo are the lips of the batfish. Its body is covered in a webbed and spotted collage. If you look closely at the top middle of the photo, you will see two eyes (the one on the left is easier to see than the eye on the right).
Their camouflaged pattern continues into their eyeball. The eyes are located on the side of the batfish’s head, giving him close to 360-degree range of vision. Between their eyes, batfish have a unicorn-like projection. This projection gets smaller as the batfish gets older. At the tip of that unicorn-like horn is a fleshy tip. It’s believed these are used as a “lure” to attract prey to the area right in front of their mouth.
These slow swimming bottom dwellers rely on camouflage and ambush predation to survive. In the bottom left corner of the photo, you will see a pink appendage, which is the batfish’s pectoral fin, which acts as an arm. The batfish will walk along the seafloor on its fins. It will graze on other fish, crustaceans, worms, and algae.
The shortnose batfish walks along the seafloor on its fins
As camouflages as they are, shortnose batfish are hard to spot
As a diver, if you are lucky enough to come across one of these, it is because you are likely moving slowly across the seafloor like the batfish. Because they are so camouflaged and do not move, batfish can be very difficult to spot! However, if you do find one, they are very approachable. As long as you don’t harass them, you can slowly float right next to them, as I did here for this photo. This batfish was photographed at Blue Heron Bridge in West Palm Beach, Florida. Although batfish can live as deep as 1,000 feet below the sea, this one was photographed in less than twenty feet of water.
Did you know? Shortnose batfish will grow to about a foot long!
0 Comments