Grab one and it swells up in your hand.
Frogfish can inflate. Threatened, the fish gulps water into its stomach until the whole body is a taut ball, sometimes half again its normal width, which makes it awkward to swallow and difficult to grip and gives a predator a reason to reconsider. It is the same trick a pufferfish uses, arrived at independently by a completely unrelated family, and it fits the frogfish's whole approach: never run, become a problem instead.
Running is not really available to them anyway. A frogfish has no fast escape: the body is a bag, the fins are hands, and the top speed is a slow crawl. Everything the animal has goes into not being identified in the first place, and inflating is what happens after that has already failed.
This one is the scarlet member of the family, though it can be orange, olive or cream instead, and its lure is the identifying feature: a plain white tip on the rod rather than the wormlike tuft most of its relatives wave. Some individuals carry a large dark spot at the base of the dorsal fin.
It likes rubble and rocky ground with some surge, from about ten meters down.
- white lure at the tip of the rod, unlike the wormlike tufts of its relatives
- sometimes a large dark spot at the base of the dorsal fin
- color anywhere from scarlet through orange to olive and cream
- up to 13 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
