Black point boxfish
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Black-point boxfish ( Lactophrys bicaudalis ) |
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Lactophrys bicaudalis | ||||||||||||
| ( Linnaeus , 1758) |
The black point boxfish ( Lactophrys bicaudalis ) lives in the Gulf of Mexico , in the Caribbean and in the tropical, western Atlantic from the Bahamas and Florida to the north coast of Brazil , as well as at Ascension . He is a shallow water inhabitant, prefers depths of 5 to 20 meters and goes a maximum of 50 meters. The fish are solitary and in their habitat in rock and coral reefs often stay in cave entrances and under overhangs. ”As members of the subfamily Ostraciinae , the 45 to 50 centimeters long fish have a closed body armor that only has openings for their fins who has eyes and mouth. Two spines just before the anal fin are characteristic of the species . The color of the animals is usually a dirty white, light ocher or gray with dark brown to black spots and some larger, fuzzy medium brown spots on the flanks and at the base of the dorsal fin . The fin rays of the caudal fin also have the black dot pattern. The mouth region of the animals is white.
Black Point box fish feed on various hard-shelled, invertebrates such as mussels , snails , crustaceans , sea stars , brittle stars , sea cucumbers , sea urchins and sea squirts as well as algae and seaweed.
footnote
- ↑ laktophrys is a great made-up word meaning “bump brow”, from λακτίζω, “knock out, push” - because originally Lactophrys also included species with over-eye thorns, “horns”, which now belong to Acanthostracion .
literature
- Baensch, Patzner: Mergus Sea Water Atlas Volume 6 Non-Perciformes (non-perch-like) . Mergus-Verlag, Melle, ISBN 3-88244-116-X
- Ewald Lieske, Robert F. Myers: Coral fish of the world . Year Top Special Verlag Hamburg, ISBN 3-86132-112-2
Web links
- Black point boxfish on Fishbase.org (English)