Welcome to SCUBA News. Halloween is approaching and so our creature of the month is the spooky Batfish, which when young can do an amazing job of mimicing something else.
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These slow moving fish are not at all intimidated by divers, and often come to "greet" you on your dive. There are five species living in warm waters throughout the Indo-Pacific, although not all species are represented in all areas. In the Red Sea, for example, you will see just three species: longfin batfish (Platax teira), circular batfish (P. orbicularis) and golden batfish (P. boersii).
Young batfish look different to the mature fish, some mimicing unpalatable things. The russet juveniles of the circular batfish, P. orbicularis, float sideways in the water and do a brilliant impersonation of dead leaves. During the day they drift, leaf-like, on their sides and feed on algae, but at night they dispense with the leaf behaviour and actively hunt for zooplankton.
Juveniles of the dusky batfish (P. pinnatus), look and behave like toxic flatworms. They too lay on their sides but these undulate just like the flatworm would.
Juvenile dusky batfish mimics a turbellarian flatworm both in coloration and body shape. Christian Gloor/CC BY 2.0
All juveniles prefer shallow, sheltered water such as in lagoons and among mangroves. You find the adults in deeper water on reefs and wrecks down to 20 or 30 m.
All Batfish have thin deep bodies. Other features they have in common are their greyish colouring and the two black or grey stripes going vertically down their bodies, one through the eye and the other at the back of the head. They grow to between 45 and 60 cm long.
Shoal of circular batfish. Madelein Wolfaardt/Depositphotos
Red Sea Reef Guide, Ewald Lieske and Robert Myers Barros, B. et al. Feeding behavior of leaf-like juveniles of the round batfish Platax orbicularis (Ephippidae) on reefs of Kuchierabu-jima Island, southern Japan. J Ethol 26, 287-293 (2008). John E Randall; Alan R Emery, On the resemblance of the young of the fishes Platax pinnatus and Plectorhynchus chaetodontoides to flatworms and nudibranchs. 1972
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