The Case of the Oval Chromis

   On  Friday morning  Sandra and I drove south to the City of Refuge.  We stopped at the Bank of Hawaii on the way to get a role of quarters for the water machine.   The plan was to stop and replenish our supply of drinking water in Kainaliu on the flip flop. 

Canthigaster jacator    Kahalu'u    March 2011

   We whipped up the bypass through Hokulia, the development for the ultra rich that never was.  At least the good republicans put in a road that the rest of us can use in their absence.  God and John Boehner willing, they got a good tax write off out of it.  Soon enough we were down Old Napoopoo Road, across the desert road and into Honaunau, the City of Refuge.

    It was pretty early, about 9:40, but there were already plenty of people on the shore and a couple inflatables full of tourists out in the bay.  By 10:00 we had waded through the maddening throng and out to the Two Step entry.  As we were putting on our fins a lady asked if it (the water) was always like that.  I had to ask, "do you mean so rough or so calm?"  And then I told her that this was calm, water was just lapping over the second step.  Another guy asked me where he could get a hat like the ones Sandra and I wear.  I said that they were operating room caps and that drug companies used to give them away.  I should have told him that any uniform shop stocks scrub caps.  He was a baldy like yours truly and he really needed a cap.

City was a great place for fish, now its a great place to knit !

    Immediately we were in the water and there was no more chit chat.  The water was cold and very clear.  The coral was good as ever, but there were dramatically fewer fish than I expected.  Later, Sandra would tell me that it had been her impression that there were fewer fish when we came earlier in the season.  The first time we came, we swam with dolphins and the second time with James and Tara, who in their youthful independence are sort of like dolphins.  At any rate, in both instances I plead distraction.

    Sadly she was correct;  there were seriously fewer fish of every variety.  We saw only a few C. jacator (the cute little Hawaiian Spotted Toby), no ambon tobies, few surgeons and parrots.  There were a few good fish, though, including a brace  of Thompson's Butterflyfish along the north cusp.

Is you is or is you ain't gonna be an Oval Chromis?

    Near the corner in about 15 feet we saw a neat little fish living in a mixed school among some rubble.  He was a clean silvery gray with a deeply forked tail.  As you know by now, 15 feet is a little deep for me, but I dove him several times and took my best shots, two of  which you see here.  I knew enough to take a good look at this little fellow.   Although I suspected it was an Oval Chromis,  I wasn't at all sure. 

    Sandra went in before me and I took a swim out to the island.  I swam among the noodlers disgorged at great expense from their bimini-covered zodiacs.  The pickings out there were heart-breakingly slim.  Five Blue-Spine Unicornfish constituted a major find.  The rubber-nosed Geeks amused themselves with a turtle.  As if that would justify their expensive boat ride.

The Spectacled Parrotfish was not at City.  Damn!

   Struggling for a good sighting, I swam all the way out to the reef on the south cusp.  Over valleys 25 feet below where in the past I have seen Spectacled Parrotfish and a small school of Sleek Unicorns.  Today Kanaloa, god of the Hawaiian seas, said, "No soup for you."   

   I'm ashamed to say, but I even struggled getting out...luckily, someone lent me a hand.  On the lava above the Two Step entry were four ladies in sand chairs knitting.  They were gabbing away, having a hell of a time.  I personally prefer to do my knitting in the shade, but to each his own.  I had to admit they were seeing about as many fish as I had... without the possibility of drowning.

Worst photo ever of Oval Chromis, 49 Black Sand Beach

    Back at the ranch, I soaked the camera and then downloaded the SD card.  I was eager to see my pictures and compare them to the  Oval Chromis in Hoover's Ultimate Guide and Randall's Shore Fishes. (I hope all you fish watchers appreciate the quality of the field guides you have to work with.  Back in the day, I was stuck with Gar Goodson and his Many Splendored Fishes.  You should hunt down a copy and compare it to what you are using. We've come a long way.)

   As we have seen, the pictures you take in the field can be immensely useful in identification of all sorts of animals.  Your photo not infrequently reveals features that you just didn't appreciate as you looked at the animal in the wild. Try as I might, I could not make the fish presented here into an Oval Chromis.  Nor did it look like any other damselfish in the book.  And it had that little black dot behind the dorsal fin.  Those little spots can be extremely useful in nailing down a difficult ID.  If the spot didn't serve some useful purpose related to successful breeding, it probably wouldn't be there.  (If you're a right wing Christian creationist, you can ignore that last bit of Darwinian blaspheme.) 

If you hear hoofbeats, its an immature Thompson's Surgeon

    So with sex among fish foremost in our secular humanistic minds,  we repaired to the Kailua Kona branch of the Hawaiian Public Library.  We rounded up the reference librarian who set me up with other Indo-Pacific fish books.  The reason for this part of the exercise: its gotta be something.  And if its not in Randall's book, maybe its a waif from Tahiti.  And maybe its never been seen in Hawaii before.  Score one for the Snorkelkids.

    Another way to look at the situation, though, is that rare things turn up rarely.  (If you hear hoofbeats, its probably a horse, not a zebra.)  And its probably in Randall's book and (talk about a kick in the hubris) I'm too dull-witted to recognize it.

    I looked at scads of damselfish and none would answer, so I went home and sent out an email for help to the Great Oz himself...John Hoover.

    I must note at this time that a few years ago it became apparent that if I wanted help identifying fish, I needed to take acceptable pictures.  So I sent John the pictures you see here, along with the pathetic picture of a fish taken weeks ago at 49 Black Sand Beach at the Mauna Lani, that I also thought might be an Oval Chromis.  And here, through the miracle of the internet (God Bless you, Al Gore) is what he wrote back:

Your 2nd "oval chromis" is not a damselfish. Should I tell you what it is, or do you want to figure it out? :) 

Your 1st "oval chromis" is most likely an oval chromis. Can't think of what else it might be.

John

Adult Thompson's Surgeonfish

   With the goading of my mentor, I opened my mind to other possibilities.   Bouncing  ideas off my co-conspirator, I noted that the tail on the "not a damselfish" was actually lunar, not forked.  So I looked at surgeonfish and found the little black spot just behind the dorsal fin on Thompson's Surgeon.   As far as I knew, Thompson's Sugeon was a fish that eats plankton out in the water column.  Were talking 100 yards off shore and 50 feet deep.  I've only seen it twice, both times off Honokohau, peacefully munching plankton in the channel leading into the boat basin north of Kailua.  They were deep in wide open water.  Also in my defense, the snout of a mature Thompson's Surgeon is rounded and blunt.  The snout on this juvenile is more acute; i.e., the front end of this fish  looks like a chromis.  Lucky for me, I had the Ultimate Guide open and this is what the Great Oz had to say, "Juveniles occur in beds of finger coral (Porites compressa). "  

Thompson's Butterflyfish,  City of Refuge,   December   2011

    Now I wonder if I've been overlooking this immature all these years.  Thompson was an illustrator at the Bishop Museum and managed to get four different unobtrusive fish named for him.  These fish that were overlooked by ichthyologists prior to 1920, primarily because they are indistinct.      I'm sure we overlooked Thompson's Butterflyfish for twenty years, now we see it regularly.   By the flamboyant standards of other butterflyfish, it almost disappears.  So if I see another juvenile Thompson's Surgeon browsing on the bottom, I won't be surprised, just a bit chagrined.

With that unsettling thought, I leave you with the slightly abridged words of John Lennon.

Gotta be good lookin' cause they're so hard to see.                                                                                                                                                                  jeff

A couple credits
The photographs of the adult Thompson's Surgeonfish and the Spectacled Parrotfish are not mine.  My beloved's son says that the beauty of the internet is that no one really cares if you steal their work.  Or words to that effect.

Being in a ship is like being in prison with a chance of being drowned.  Dr. Samuel Johnson