A tall, flattened, plain gray-brown fish to 76 cm (30 in) with a single long spine over the eye and almost no markings. The plainness is the identification: the other big filefish here is scrawled with blue lines, and this one is not.
The spine is the file of the name and the trigger of its relatives. It locks upright and can only be released by a smaller spine behind it, so a fish jammed into a crevice cannot be extracted - the same lock the triggerfishes use, in a family that mostly does not live in crevices at all.
Unlike the reef filefishes it spends much of its life in open water, drifting with the current and grazing on whatever floats: jellyfish, salps, algae, small crustaceans. Juveniles live under drifting weed far offshore, which is where the young of most open-ocean fish spend their first months.
It is fished heavily in Asia and turns up in surimi and dried fish products, and large individuals have caused ciguatera poisoning - unusual for a fish this far down the food chain, and a reminder that the toxin travels by way of what an animal grazes as well as what it hunts.
tall flattened gray-brown body with no pattern to speak of
single long spine above the eye, raised and locked when alarmed
small pointed mouth and a rounded tail, fins nearly transparent
length up to 76 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no known species-specific threats to A. monoceros.
Aluterus monoceros is a reef-associated fish. Although no documented declined in population have been recorded, it may be experiencing population decline due to loss of habitat. As of 2008, fifteen percent of the world’s coral reefs were considered under imminent threat of being “Effectively Lost” (with 90% of the corals lost and unlikely to recover soon), with regions in East Africa, South and South-east Asia, and the wider Caribbean being the most highly threatened (Wilkinson 2008)
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
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