Over the the summer many new strange things have swum, crawled, slithered, or suctioned their way into the lobster traps. One such wondrous creature was this strange looking fish.
"What is it?" our boat captain looked at me as be both debated if it was safe to touch. Racking my brain I quickly tried to mentally picture every poisonous fish in the North Atlantic that I knew of before looking at him and shrugging. Throwing caution and better judgment out the window I grabbed a fisherman's glove and extracted our fun looking trap invader.
After a few minutes of holding our fish friend I knew just a little bit more about it: the white belly of the fish was flat and sort of concave, and the large lateral black spots were hard lumps. Clueless I sent the picture to a friends who use to work at an aquarium who told me it was a lumpfish.
To Google I went to find out more about our new found friend. These are some seriously cool fish.
Cool Fact #1: The belly of the lumpfish acts as a giant suction cup allowing it to stick itself fast to a rock and lay in wait for food to go swimming by.
Cool Fact #2: An 18 inch female lumpfish can lay 136,000 eggs at once. These eggs glue together to form one large mass which sinks to the bottom of the ocean where the male will stand guard over them fanning them with his fins to make sure no silt or debris settles onto them. The male will continue to fan them stopping only to drive off interloping predators. The male will not eat until after the eggs hatch. Some norther European counties sell lumpfish eggs as a cheap caviar.
Cool Fact #3: They can get really big!! They have been found in the wild to be about 2 feet in length and weighing about 21 pounds.
Cool Fact #4: Some tracked lumpfish have migrated 187-364 miles.
Cool Fact #5: They are being used in commercial fish farming operations as a predator for salmon lice!
Want to know more
http://www.gma.org/fogm/Cyclopterus_lumpus.htm
http://waves-vagues.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/Library/365981.pdf
http://sciencenordic.com/breeding-gluttons-battle-against-salmon-lice
https://www.hatcheryinternational.com/research/breeding-super-lice-eater-lumpsuckers-1468?jjj=1536960262896
