Cleaning Up Bali

   Before I get going with the Bali fish list I want to channel Garret Morris as Chico Escuela, the Dominican baseball player turned sports reporter.  This goes all the way back to Saturday Night Live,

Garrett Morris and John Belushi   Kona be berry, berry good to me.

1978.  Who among us (and here I count on the vast majority of my readers being old enough to remember watching TV in 1978) can forget Chico intoning, "Beisbol be berry, berry good to me."  In a later episode, working with Jane Curtain, Chico said, "In National Hockey league, I don't know."  and then, "In beisbol, Pete Rose, 3.2 milllion dollah.  Atta boy, Johnny Hustle, you bet."

   Well, Chico is now living in the Paradise View Condominiums down on Alii Drive and the blog has hired him as weatherman.  "In Cleveland, Ohio, I don't know.  In Kona, cool dry breezes, cool wet water, an' warm brown women. Hawaii be berry, berry good to me"

   Suffice it to say, be you Chico Escuela or this humble correspondent, being in Kona this December is pretty sweet.  Berry, berry good at a minimum.

   At this point most of you will turn off the set and go outside to pull weeds, or if you live in one of the northern climes,  you might put on your stocking cap and shovel snow off the driveway.  Does tedium loom?  I will let you, my faithful readers, be the judge.

   Since returning from Bali I have been working on the list.  Like confirmed and inherently competitive birdwatchers, us fishwatchers take the list pretty seriously.  The night before we left Bali,  I totaled up the number of fish that I had identified and came up with 243 species.   This was mildly disappointing as I had been telling anyone who would listen that we would see 250.  At that time, I suspected that with a little work I could add a couple more, but I didn't have a clear idea how that work would proceed.

    As it turns out, there are four categories of fish that have found their way onto the list.  The first were a very few species that I had simply forgot to check off.  All I had to do was read through the checklist (composed of all the fish seen on three previous trips to Bali)  and add, for example, the ornate butterflyfish.  So this first group was composed of fish that we knew well, but in the confusion of the moment had neglected to add to the list.

The Red spotted Jawfish became the Brown Barred Goby

    The second were fish that I had taken excellent pictures of and failed to identify.  In some cases I had put them on the list but given them a new name, presumably with the intention of some day going back and trying vainly to identify them.  In that case, these lateral moves only made the list better, not longer.  Over the past two weeks, I have been pleased to discover that the internet works quite a bit better here in Estados Unidos than it did in Pemuteran and Ubud.  Not only that, it has been astonishing, even to me, that there is so much information on the internet, so many pictures and descriptions of fish found at the ends of the earth.  I
really believe that this is considerably different than even a few years ago.

   At any rate, we have corrected some mis-identifications.  That wonderful jawfish we showed you in an earlier blog, to which I gave the name Red Spotted Jawfish, turns out to be the Brown Barred Goby, Amblygobius phalaena.   When asked to come look at this discovery, my beloved wife wondered if the name was related to its large, funny looking eyes.  The similarity between the words amblygobius and amblyopia were just too much for Sandra to ignore. 

Orange Spotted Goby,  Istigobius rigilius    Menangen Island 2017

     By trolling through pages related to dragonets I found the Orange Spotted Goby, Istigobius rigilius.  We have a beautiful picture of this white fish, looking for all the world like the bride at a dragonet wedding, perched on some powderized coral, on the flats at Menagen island.

   A couple years ago on the beach at Waialea Bay, my guru Bob Hillis commented on the number of gobies on his Hawaii list and how he might have just found a new one in the tide pool twenty feet from our picnic.  I dutifully examined the tide pool, didn't see anything and then, under my breath, made some deprecating remark to the effect that gobies were such plain, insignificant fish that I could not in good conscience attempt to identify them.  This was not the first time in my career as a mediocre naturalist, that I have quietly accused a superior observer of making it up, knowing full well that I was finding a way to excuse my own feeble brain and poor eyesight. Well, perhaps we need to rethink our position, vis a vis gobies.

Yellow Spotted Scorpionfish   Sebastapistes cyanostigma

       The picture of which I am most proud involves a small, secretive scorpionfish.  This animal was hiding in a cauliflower coral and stayed still while the smart little red camera did its magic.   What we have is a beautiful photo of a Yellow Spotted Scorpionfish.   Searching Google for the genus Sebastapistes  (the genus of the speckled scorpionfish found in cauliflower coral in Hawaii) and Bali, I immediately came up with two hits from Australian sites.  As it turns out, this is a widespread fish in the western Pacific, but only the extremely curious carrying a smart little camera are likely to identify it.


    The list of this second group of fish would stretch to a dozen or so.  But the third and fourth groups are more interesting.  For as long as our military has been fighting in the middle east, we have been exposed, on the nightly news, to a recurring situation.  The enemy is hiding in a house and some pilot sitting at a console in Fort Huachuca, Arizona  pulverizes the house with a missile shot from a drone.

This Snooty Wrasse (unlike Everett McGill) is Bonafide 

  The following day it turns out that the militants were permitting a family of four to remain in the house.  That family, we are told, is collateral damage.

   Don't worry. Completing the fish list did not involve any dead Muslims, or even any dead fish. Our collateral damage involves finding new fish in pictures taken of other fish. Suffice it to say, Yesterday I was looking at one of the two truly beautiful fish that I had not been able to identify and I spotted an unmistakable sign on an adjacent fish...barbels.  The beautiful fish, possibly a dottyback, was twenty feet deep, so the picture even of the object fish wasn't perfect.  I asked Sandra to come over, pointed in the general direction with the cursor and she verified that we had a dark fish with whiskers.  (I can here you now, "Poor Sandra.  She should have been having a coffee at Starbucks.)  We then had a little debate about whether the nearby yellow tail, which had directed my attention to the fish in the first

Sergeant Schultze's Pipefish.  I know nussink,  I see nussink.

place, was associated with the dark fish with whiskers or the inanimate object next to it, which I maintain is a peice of coral rubble.  My position was that the yellow tail was indeed associated with that fish.  And the fish was a bicolor goatfish.

   This points out a dilemma.  Let us say that before you can add a fish to the list, you have to complete a questionnaire.  Did you see the fish in the wild?  Did you identify the fish from a photograph?  In a case like this, the answers are no and yes.  many is the time, especially with small secretive animals like hermit crabs and fish that hide in coral, that us latter day naturalists point a very smart camera in their direction, focus and shoot.  Back at the ranch, we are often blessed with a very convincing photo...of an animal that we at least saw with our own eyes, albeit not well enough to identify. 

    There is no way that I saw that bicolor goatfish in the wild.  I simply captured it inadvertently  in a digital image.  I don't know of any rules in the birding community that cover this eventuality.  It
simply wasn't much of a problem prior to digital photography.  In searching the internet, I did not find an answer to my question, so I attempted to call that consummate arbitrator of listers, the American Birding Association.  Naturally they did not answer the phone, so I called the Portland Audubon society and spoke to Joe Liebbezeit.  Joe is an ace birder, keeps a list and, most importantly, happened to be in the office. 

   Joe's opinion was that if you captured a bird in your camera, you could count it, but with a

Ruby Headed Fairy Wrasse,  Cirrhilabrus  cyanopleura  Jemeluk

notation.  I liked this idea,  because it was what I was already doing and it got the bicolor goatfish onto the life list.  

   Finally, we were left with a couple fish that defied identification.  And so, on our last afternoon in Pemuteran, we spent an hour at Sea Rovers where one of the owners, Wayan, attempted to identify a few fish that I could not find in Reef Fish Identification, Tropical Pacific, By Gerald Allen, et al.   Wayan was very gracious, gave us each a cold bottle of water and, along with our guide Aleef, attempted to identify our mystery fish.  He was pleased to put names on the mystery fish and we left happy, clutching our cold bottles of water.

     Sadly, if you are keeping score at home, Wayan went 0 for 2.  But little did we know.

     Luckily, our co-conspirator, Peter (who was the same guy that suggested that Wayan might be able to identify our fish)  sent us an email a few days ago.  Peter had found a site, i Naturalist.org.  Run by the California Academy of Sciences, iNatralist permits you to submit pictures of unidentified organisms.

Peter, Wayan and Aleef discuss fish identification.

The experts at CAS then attempt to identify your animals and, I suppose, plants.  In the process of introducing me to this site, Peter shared his own iNaturalist account.  Right there, I found a correction to one of my identifications.  (In my defense, there are a plethora of cardinalfish.) 

    The first fish we tackled with our new best friends at CAS was an active fish that we had seen twice.  The first observation was at Jemeluk where it was swimming in a mixed school of damsels and fusiliers, feeding on plankton.  The second was at the drop off at Mangroves on Menangen Island, Pemuteran.  This is a very pretty fish, he has a head the color of a ripe plum.  Or possibly a Beaujolais nouveau with the sun shining through the glass.  

Blueside Wrasse  Cirrhilabrus  cyanopleura  Menangen Island 2017

    Wayan had called this fish a Rainbow Anthias.  The identifier at iNaturalist, who goes by the screen name maractwin, called it a Bluesided Wrasse.  This fish is found in our field guide.  However, the picture there looks absolutely nothing like what we saw. I searched  the scientific name,  Cirrhilabrus   cyanopleura,  and came up with a fistful of hits.  There I discovered that our fish, in the color pattern we observed, is known as the Ruby Headed Fairy Wrasse.  Not only that, from LiveAquaria.com you can buy one for 34.99 plus shipping.  Live caught, aquarium conditioned.  they recommend a 90 gallon tank and operators are standing by.   Perfect. 

   The second fish we added to the corrected list was one we had seen three years ago at Jemeluk in the very same place.  And it was in the process of photographing this enigma that we caught the bicolor goatfish.  As you can see, this is a beautiful light colored fish with a blue head.  I thought it might be a dottyback. Having never seen a dottyback I was in a poor position to say, but Wayan agreed and named it the bicolor dottyback.   Maractwin, on the other hand, thinks it is a damselfish, specifically the Pink (or King) Demoiselle, Chrysiptera rex.  Once again this fish is found in the book
and looks nothing like what we saw.

Pink Demoiselle, Chrysiptera rex   By Diver's Cafe, Jemeluk  2017  If you find the fish with the barbels you win a prize.

    Early in our trip, I pointed out to Peter and Marla that the Indo-Pacific is a big place.  If you are used to using a solid field guide like Hoover, you have become accustomed to pictures of fish taken in Hawaii.  In the wide region covered by the field guide we were using, there can be many different color patterns for a given species.  Or to put it succinctly, the fish you find in Bali may not look like the one in that book. 

    As before, the internet provided several pictures  of the Pink Demoiselle very like the one that I took.  Sadly, I did not find one for sale.  I guess I will just have to rely on my memories.  

    You can wake up now.  I think he is finally done.

   Thanks so much for wading through this blog.  I hope you enjoyed the pictures and that this excessive bit of reading did not induce amblyopia.  If nothing else, the next time you see a fish or a plant that you can't identify, you know who to call.  And I don't mean Wayan. 

jeff 2017

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