Strange Fish Catches: ID These Species

What Type of Filefish Is This?

QUESTION: My buddy Dan and I were fishing off the lava rocks in Kona, Hawaii, this summer and caught all kinds of different reef fish that we were able to identify after looking at pictures online and local fish-identification charts available on the island. But this one we couldn’t find anywhere. It looks like some type of triggerfish or unicorn fish, but none of them were this color nor had the spike pointing straight up. I saw one that looked like this washed up on the Pacific shore in Cabo San Lucas many years ago. Can you tell us what it is? — Frank Gouveia, Pleasanton, California

ANSWER: It’s no surprise you found this one hard to identify, Frank, because it appears you were lucky enough to catch an unusually pale, color-reversed specimen of barred filefish, Cantherhines dumerilii. Also known as the yelloweye filefish, the more colorful adult males of this species are usually a dark-gray color in the body, with several lighter vertical bars along the flanks that contrast with their translucent yellow dorsal and anal fins and the striking yellow/orange tail. On the other hand, juveniles of this species can be almost black but are covered in many small white dots. Barred filefish grow only to around 15 inches long.

They occur widely throughout the tropical Indo-Pacific from Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and across the Pacific from Hawaii to Japan, and as far east as the west coasts of Colombia and Panama. They’re bottom grazers usually encountered in pairs (one male, one female) at depths of 12 to 100 feet around tropical islands.