A shaggy lump of a fish covered in skin filaments, striped and streaked, sitting in weed and debris on soft bottom. Color runs from black through brown to bright yellow, and an individual can change it over weeks to match wherever it has settled.
The fishing rod is the best in the family. The first dorsal spine carries a lure shaped like a segmented worm, sometimes with several branches, and the fish waves it in a slow curl in front of its own mouth. Frogfish lures are species-specific imitations - worm, shrimp, small fish - and this one does worms.
The strike takes about six milliseconds and works by suction: the mouth expands to many times its volume and the prey arrives with the water. The stomach then stretches to take animals as long as the frogfish itself, including other frogfish.
It does not swim if it can walk. The pectoral fins have an elbow and are used to clamber over the bottom, and when it does swim it does so by gulping water and firing it out through the small round gill openings behind the arms - jet propulsion, in a fish that looks incapable of movement at all.
The genus. Antennarius Daudin 1816 - -ius (pertaining to antenna). ETYFish
The species. Antennarius striatus (Shaw 1794) - striped or streaked. ETYFish
- shaggy body covered in skin filaments, in yellow, black, brown or orange
- dark stripes and streaks radiating over the body, often broken
- lure at the end of the rod is a worm-shaped tuft, sometimes branched
- length up to 25 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
