Copper strip tweezers
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Copper Striped Tweezer Fish ( Chelmon rostratus ) |
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| Chelmon rostratus | ||||||||||||
| ( Linnaeus , 1758) |
The copper striped tweezer fish ( Chelmon rostratus ) is a species from the butterfly fish family .
features
The fish has a silvery white, high-backed and laterally flattened body. It is characterized by the four vertical orange stripes. The foremost of these stripes runs over the eyes. As is typical for many butterfly fish, the copper-striped tweezer fish also has a conspicuous, white-fringed, black eye-spot in the rear area of the dorsal fin . This eye spot is an adaptation to optically oriented predators. When chasing their prey fish, predatory fish often focus on their eyes and are thus deceived as to their direction of flight. The black longitudinal stripe at the root of the caudal fin is also lined with white.
The copper striped tweezer fish reaches a length of up to 22 cm.
Occurrence
It is a territorial species of fish that lives singly or in pairs in the tropical western Pacific from the Andaman Sea to the Great Barrier Reef off Australia . It inhabits shallow inner reefs and lagoons with strong coral growth and can be found up to a depth of 25 meters. With its greatly elongated mouth, it pecks for small crabs in sandy areas.
The attractively colored copper-striped tweezer fish is often seen in public marine aquariums .
literature
- Robert Patzner, Horst Moosleitner: Mergus Sea Water Atlas . 6th volume. 1st edition. Mergus Verlag, Melle 1999, ISBN 3-88244-116-X .
Web links
- Copper Striped Tweezer Fish on Fishbase.org (English)
- Chelmon rostratus inthe IUCN 2013 Red List of Threatened Species . 2. Posted by: Myers, R. & Pratchett, M., 2009. Retrieved February 7, 2014.