A big, plain, brilliantly silver fish with a huge forked tail and no markings whatsoever, cruising shallow water without any apparent purpose. Up to 180 cm (6 ft), and the largest fish here that eats no animals at all.
The mouth has no teeth. It grazes algal mats, diatoms and the fine organic film off sand and seagrass, filtering the rest with gill rakers, which puts an animal of this size at the bottom of the food chain rather than the top. The eye is covered by a layer of fatty tissue, an adaptation shared with mullets, and its function is still argued over.
Its economic history is stranger than the fish. Milkfish will not spawn readily in captivity, so for centuries farms across Asia were stocked by collecting wild fry - millions of transparent larvae, netted along shorelines by hand, sold by the thousand, and grown in ponds. Hatcheries eventually solved the problem, but for a long time an entire industry depended on people wading in the shallows counting fish smaller than an eyelash.
On this coast it is a lagoon fish, uncommon and easy to overlook: a large silver shape that turns out, on a closer look, to have nothing to catch anything with.
The species. Chanos chanos (Fabricius 1775) - possibly derived from chani. ETYFish
- bright silver body with an olive back, no marks at all
- large deeply forked tail, dark-edged
- small toothless mouth, and a fatty tissue covering most of the eye
- cruises in a loose group in shallow water, unhurried
- length up to 180 cm
