It hunts with water. A triggerfish working sand blows a jet from its mouth to excavate, uncovering the buried animals it wants, and it turns the same jet on things it cannot safely bite: a sea urchin is hit with water until it rolls over, and once it is upside down the fish goes in at the underside, where the spines are short and the shell is thin. Some individuals go further and pick an urchin up by a single spine, carry it out into open water and drop it, then take whatever lands the wrong way up.
Using something that is not part of your body to solve a problem is rare in fish, and a stream of water counts. Triggerfishes do it routinely, and they do it against an animal that is otherwise almost unattackable.
This one is the deeper, plainer member of the family here. It works sand and rubble beside reef from about eight meters down past a hundred and eighty, well below where its shallow relatives live, and it is nowhere near as common on this coast as they are. Look for a gray-brown fish with a pale bar behind the mouth like a bridle, a yellowish band from the eye to the pectoral base, and the steep blunt head the group shares.
On danger: nothing about this fish is toxic and FishBase rates it harmless. The flag on the card is nest defense, which every triggerfish does, and the rule is the one that covers all of them - the territory is a cone standing on the nest and widening upward, so you leave low and sideways rather than up.
The species. Sufflamen fraenatum (Latreille 1804) - bridled. ETYFish
- gray-brown body with a pale bar behind the mouth, like a bridle
- yellowish band from the eye to the pectoral fin base in adults
- steep blunt head with a small mouth set high
- over open sand and rubble at depth rather than on the reef top
- up to 38 cm
