Fish are Fiends not Food
Fish are friends not food goes the saying among scuba divers and naturalists who appreciate fish as fascinating wildlife, and don’t want to see them killed.
No, I am not preaching to anyone what to eat or not to eat (there is little effect of such preaching anyway), but I personally stopped eating fish a while ago, after seeing so many sadly overfished marine habitats in the Philippines, with few fish bigger than 20 cm left on big stretches of reefs. What also impressed me, negatively, were the effects of fish-farms I saw, where large stretches of ocean became so acidic from the fish poop that no corals could grow anywhere near the fish farms. I don’t want to contribute to this environmental destruction via my diet. I don’t completely eat a vegetarian diet yet, I still eat chicken, but fish, caught from struggling ecosystems, is out for me. There are of course problems (environmental and animal ethics ones) with raising chickens on an industrial scale, but the damage can be constrained, and mitigated, and the calories/protein per area produced via chicken is much higher compared to fishing a reef empty; we don’t hunt birds from intact forests anymore.
As stated above, I am not preaching, just explaining my own choice, and of course I don’t want to stop the people who depend on fish for their protein intake from eating fishes. The majority of fish eaters are certainly middle class people all over the world who eat it for cultural and culinary reasons, and these preferences are too deep seated; I won’t spend my time trying to challenge them. Everybody should do what they want, but ideally be honest to themselves about the consequences.
Rant over; I think the aforementioned phrase is true, but I also think that fish are fiends not food is true. How can fish fight divers if they are barbecued? Below is the top three of my fish versus diver, and fish versus fish combat footage. The videos below show what smart, fast, switched-on animals many species of fishes are.
Number one is the viral encounter I had with an irate triggerfish, a triggered triggerfish which didn’t even offer the chivalry of a trigger warning to me. It got annoyed because I was too close to its nest, unknowingly. Enjoy:
Almost as aggressive as triggerfish, but fortunately smaller, are the anemonefish. Especially if their host anemone is in the middle of a sandy area, a “muck” habitat, the “Nemos” are very feisty, and even attack divers who are orders of magnitude bigger than them:
Fish also fight each other, of course. The aggression shown against divers didn’t evolve to fight off humans on scuba, of course, but to fight off fish invaders into the territories of a fish. In the video below I was lucky enough to capture the encounter of a couple of sand gobies with a single intruding goby of the same species. Note how coordinated the defensive behavior of the couple was. I had to slow things down in editing for the viewers to be able to appreciate this quick fish behavior:
Best Fishes,
Klaus
