A well-known British species is the Striped or Red Wrasse, the sexes of which exhibit a remarkable variation in colour, the male having the body marked with blue streaks or a blackish band, whilst the female has two or three large black blotches across the tail. A second British species, the Ballan Wrasse, is bluish green in colour, with the scales and fin-rays reddish orange. It may be found hiding in the deep gullies among rocks, sheltering in the dense clusters of seaweed, and feeding on crabs and shrimps. It takes a bait freely, and fishermen have remarked that at first they catch few but large fish; some days later a great number may be caught, but all will be of small size, indicating that the larger fish assume the dominion of a district and keep the smaller at bay.
Photo by W. Saville-Kent, F.Z.S.] [Milford-on-Sea.
SATIN PARROT-FISH.
The Parrot-fishes, or Parrot-wrasses, are so called on account of the peculiar structure of the teeth in the front of the jaws, which form a sharp-edged beak.
Amongst the most brilliantly coloured of the wrasses are the Parrot-fish. Mr. Saville-Kent, writing of the species which inhabit the waters of the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, remarks that to stand up to your knees or higher in water, with such a shoal of magnificent fishes swimming round you, is an experience well worth a journey to the tropics. The coloration of these fishes, which is extremely transient, fading almost immediately after death, nearly defies description. One of the most beautiful is perhaps the Gold-finned Coral-fish, in which the body is of an intense ultramarine, whilst the fins are bright golden. Others have the most amazing combinations of green, vermilion, blue, and yellow, in endless variety. It was one of the parrot-fishes which found such favour with the ancients. "In the time of Pliny," writes Dr. Günther, "it was considered to be the first of fishes ... and the expense incurred by Elipentius was justified, in the opinion of the Roman gourmands, by the extreme delicacy of the flesh. It was a fish, said the poet, whose very excrement the gods themselves were unwilling to reject. Its flesh was tender, agreeable, sweet, easy of digestion, and quickly assimilated; yet, if it happened to have eaten an aplysia, it produced violent diarrhœa." To this day the Greeks hold it in high regard, and eat it with sauce made of its liver and intestines. It feeds on seaweed, and from its habit of thoroughly chewing its food, and moving it backwards and forwards in the mouth, it was at one time believed that this fish chewed the cud after the fashion of the ruminating mammals!
Photo by W. Saville-Kent, F.Z.S.] [Milford-on-Sea.
BLACK-SPOTTED PARROT-FISH.
The flesh of some of the Parrot-wrasses is of great delicacy.