The young of this fish pretend to be something poisonous, and they do it well enough to fool people who look at reef animals for a living.
A juvenile painted frogfish is black with white and orange markings, and it does not sit still like an adult. It crawls slowly over open bottom in plain view, in the exposed unhurried way of an animal with nothing to fear. What it resembles is a phyllidiid nudibranch: a sea slug loaded with toxins from the sponges it eats, brightly marked as a warning, and left alone by every predator on the reef.
So the frogfish gets the protection of a warning signal without owning any of the chemistry behind it. This is the classic free rider arrangement, and it works only while the models are common enough that predators keep meeting real ones and learning the lesson again.
The adult drops the disguise and takes up the family trade: sit against a sponge, match its color and texture, and wait. This species is the one most often found actually touching a sponge, which is where you should look for it, and it takes months to repaint itself if it moves to a new one.
The rest is standard frogfish, a lumpy body on arm-like fins, a rod between the eyes and a mouth that opens wider than the fish is tall.
The genus. Antennarius Daudin 1816 - -ius (pertaining to antenna). ETYFish
The species. Antennarius pictus (Shaw 1794) - painted. ETYFish
- round warty body with scattered dark spots and ringed blotches
- three obvious pores on the body, and a lure on a short rod above the mouth
- usually sitting against a sponge of the same color
- juveniles black with white and orange markings, crawling like a nudibranch
- up to 30 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
