A Box Fish on Boxing Day

     At last a quest at which it will be difficult to fail.  The male Pacific boxfish is a handsome devil, in an angular sort of way.   And the female / juvenile boxfish is damn near ubiquitous.  How thoughtful of our friends across the pond to create such a fish friendly holiday.  Which, I suppose, begs the question, "Is Boxing Day really a holiday?"  To which I reply, "Close enough."

An ominous sky sailed over K Bay on Boxing Day

    Maybe you have become tired of every blog beginning with a beautiful day, blue sky, fleecy clouds.  Well, this Boxing Day didn't really dawn, it was more like someone turned up the light slowly on a smudge.  And it was cool and humid, a bad combination that leaves everything just a bit damp.  It started raining an hour or so after dinner and continued sporadically throughout the night.  This meant the coqui frogs, ordinarily crepuscular, kept chirping when the rest of us wished we were fast asleep.  This makes sense if you're a frog and you want nice moist eggs.  It's unfortunate that it comes at the expense of a good night's sleep and truly dry towels.

    On Boxing Day morning Sandra took me swimming at Kahalu'u.  As we said before, the boxfish should be a chip shot, so we could go where ever we wished with a strong hope of success.   I had a

good feeling about K Bay.   We arrived early, with the sky looking like something out of a Stephen King novel.  The shelter was empty except for a brace of young Asian women wearing blue Ts proclaiming someone's 80th birthday.  I only saw seven of these young women. While I was swimming Sandra saw two bus fulls.

   Having been dragged kicking and screaming to my senses, I donned two layers of neoprene, a weight belt (yes, the ocean is cold in the winter) and hit the surf.  The first thing I noticed was that the
water was startlingly clear.  Just as I was clearing the narrow, rocky passage into the outer entrance, I came face to face with a nice big juvenile surge wrasse.  I turned in the passage and fumbled for my camera, but the brute was gone.

   As I exited into the bay, I nabbed a fine male boxfish.  If you have to tilt at windmills, this may be

A Hebrew Cone on sand, Kahalu'u.  Boxing Day 2019

the one you want to contest.  But let's not be hasty.  There was a time not so long ago when scribbled filefish was common at Kahalu'u, Achilles tang was seen here regularly and milletseed butterflies swarmed.  So I am going to treasure this boxfish.

    As I was readjusting my flippers I saw a Hebrew cone half buried in the sand.  In the past, I have made the mistake of pulling such a cone out to get a better picture.  This was the wrong thing to do.  Most salt water snails share a dietary preference not unlike the slugs and snails we enjoy in our garden, and brought to song by Donovan back in the Summer of Love; they are herbivores.  Cones, on the other hand, are carnivorous snails.  When one sees a cone half buried, it is likely that the snail is mostly out of his shell, hunting for his dinner in the sand.  If one plucks him out, he risks harming the soft body of the cone shell snail.  Bad Jeffrey.  I left this Hasidic cone alone and luckily got a picture of one sitting proudly on the sandy surface a bit later in the swim.

Juvenile Hawaiian Dascyllus, Kahalu', boxing Day 2019

    Just a few strokes further out into the bay, I came upon an infant Hawaiian Dascyllus.  It had been a good long time since I had seen a baby dascyllus at Kahalu'u and this little fellow made my heart soar.

   As you can see, this guy was harboring around rocks and rubble.  He may not quite meet the criteria for a waif, but darn close.  We'll let you know how he does in the ensuing months.

    Prior to 2014, there were clouds of bay dascyllus surrounding cauliflower corals in the shallows all up and down the Kona coast.  Hot water killed all the cauliflower coral.  It is recovering slowly, but the dascyllus is not.  The only place I know of where you can see this super cool baby dependably is around the pillars at Kawaihae harbor.  There it is found around relatively small pocillopora corals.  I can't tell you why these baby dascyllus are there and not around similar small branching corals at the pier.  Sadly, there is precious little branching coral at Kahalu'u. 

Reticulated Dascyllus Lipah Bay, Bali  November 2014

    As you can see, the juvenile Hawaiian dascyllus is a pretty little fish.  In Bali, we have found the reticulated dascyllus.  This is a pretty little fish.  It raises its babies on coral that rise in the shallows like a cake stand, a horizontal plate with innumerable little spikes sit just below the surface.  A myriad of babies lived between these small coral spikes.  I can think of no sadder sight than returning to Lipah Bay in 2017 and finding  this coral deteriorated to the point where only a few of these little spikes remained, along with one or two baby reticulated dascyllus.  This happened over the same time frame as in Hawaii, which is to say, very rapidly starting in 2015.

    Beside a small coral head just a meter away from the baby dascyllus, I found a red labrid wrasse.  This is the baby of the yellow tailed coris that we talked about recently.  These are sweet little fish

and we enjoyed this guy.














     
    About ten yards seaward and I happened upon a very special cone shell sitting in a depression of coral rocks and rubble.  This is  a leopard cone.  John Hoover tells us that this is the largest cone found in Hawaii.  This shell was probably four inches long, although the shell can grow to 9 inches.  That would be a big cone shell, indeed.  The larger shells are covered with a thick, fuzzy coating.

Leopard Cone,  Boxing Day 2019

smaller shells, like this one, show the striking spotted pattern.  The leopard cone usually lives at depth, but is rarely found in the shallows.  As I looked at this picture, it occurred to me that that this shell might contain a large hermit crab.  I didn't handle the shell and we'll never know who was living inside.








 


  One of my favorite fish is the juvenile blackside hawkfish.  You have seen this little guy several times in the blog, but since I never get tired of it, I'm going to share this pretty picture of a

Juvenile Blackside Hawkfish, Boxing Day2019

cooperative juvenile freckleface hawkfish..

















   
      Well, this was the day for juvenile fish.  As I made my way towards the exit, I happened upon this attractive little flounder.  Don't you love those brilliant blue and whitespots.  Being trained as a birdwatcher, I really wanted this to be a new species, but  research confirms that it is the juvenile of

Juvenile Peacock Flounder, Boxing Day 2019

the peacock flounder.

   Back on the beach, Sandra had made friends with the party of Korean ladies wearing the blue Ts. Although Sandra has not a word of Korean to her name, she got a hug from the 80 year old birthday girl.

Is this how we look to the Almighty?

    When their buses arrived, the Koreans left in a flash.  Had they been North Koreans, it might have
been the flash of an atomic bomb.

    After the Koreans left, she watched (and photographed) a young man flipper walk from his picnic table all the way into the bay.  While she was waiting for me, she shared her pictures with Bob Hillis, 3000 miles away. Bob said that no matter how silly that young gentleman looks to us, in the eyes of God we all look just as goofy.  So we leave you with a little humility courtesy of the man from St. George, Utah.

May all your boxes be full of goodies,
jeff