The batfish

The unimaginable and unforgettable face of a Cocos Island rosy lipped batfish

The Batfish is about as large as your open hand, is nearly flat on top, has a long snout that looks like a miniature unicorn’s, has whiskers on its chin, and has its pectoral fins splayed to the side such that it looks like a road-kill Frogfish. (If you don’t know about Frogfish, visit your local aquarium or library, and stay tuned for future journal entries.) If its shape isn’t strange enough, its coloration is even better. It has bright red lips! This fish is so clumsy in appearance and locomotion that a human can pick it up underwater. I often wonder how any fish can be so slow can survive, so as a general rule I carefully examine such species. I look for venomous spines or dangerous protuberances, and lacking them, I presume that there must be some chemical defense that the beast employs or it would soon have become extinct. The batfish has a leathery, almost sandpaper rough skin, but that is hardly a defense. I cautiously licked the skin to see if there was a strongly distasteful slime that would cause me (or a grouper or a snapper) to spit it out, and found none. In that it is our only specimen and they are so rare, I didn’t filet it and dine on it a la fugu, because that would be both unscientific and contrary to our permit. So, we carefully photographed the batfish, watched the it in the aquarium, and will ultimately preserve some of its tissue for DNA analysis and the remainder will reside in formaldehyde in a jar on the shelf of the fish collection of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco