Bird Wrasse
Female
Male
Common Names: Greenbird
Wrasse (Male)
Blackbird Wrasse (Female)
Brownbird Wrasse (Female)
Hawaiian Name:
Hi-na-le-a nu-ku 'i-'i-wi
Scientific Name:
Gomphosus varius
(Lacepede, 1801)
Source Info:
Fishes of Hawaii by Spencer W. Tinker
The Bird Wrasse is one fish
that can be identified easily by sex because of its colors. The Greenbird
is the male and the Blackbird/Brownbird is the female.
The male has an all green
body. The green can range in color from a light olive to a dark kelly
green to sometimes a deep greenish-blue. The female body is a light
white-cream color on the front half and a black or dark brownish color
on the back half. The lighter front half of the body has black markings
on each scale. The "beak" is a peach or light orange color.
They can be a very flighty
fish. By flighty we mean they can move rapidly and have a
tendency to jump out of a tanks. We have found if we do not keep
a cover of some sort on a tank with these fish in them, we'll end up finding
them on the floor.
It is one of the Wrasses
in the Wrasse Fish Family that prefers to
hide under rocks and corals rather than bury itself in the sand or gravel.
It will bury itself, but we find it doesn't happen very often. They
are great at figuring out where to hide. The females catch on very
quickly that they can go down inside the up-flow tubes of the undergravel
filter. If startled they'll head right for this hiding place and
it's next to impossible to get them to come out. Since we have to
catch them to ship them, we designed large holder containers with holes
in them and put the females in these containers.
The females average a length
to about six inches. The males can reach a stunning length of up
to 11 inches, and we have actually caught a few at almost 14 inches.
It is one species where the females will change sex into males. Sometimes
we will catch a female that is making the change over to a male and it
possesses a combination of both color patterns. We call these a Greenbird/Blackbird.
The distribution of this
species extends from Hawaii southward to central Polynesia and westward
to Micronesia, Melanesia and southern Japan, through the East Indies, and
across the Indian Ocean to the coast of Africa and the Red Sea.
Bird Wrasses eat small crustaceans
like crabs and shrimp. Their long beak nose is designed for picking
these critters out of rocks and corals. We find they will eat tank
fed foods like shrimp and flake food and are a fairly easy Wrasse to care
for.
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