Known for it's orange lips and orange spines at the tail the orangespine unicornfish is actually hornless. The bluespine unicornfish has the horn (that's why it's called a unicorn fish, duh!) but apparently since this one got all of the color they don't get to have a horn.
The body color on this fish changes the more the fish gets annoyed. When they get aggressive with a predator the body gets a darker blue in color and you can tell by the color of this one he was only slightly annoyed with me.
If you look really closely at the photos you can see the orange spines at the tail actually protrude out in a curved fashion toward the front of the fish. I am told the spines are extremely sharp (and painful should you get too close).
What's that you say? You want to know the Hawaiian name for this fish? Well, if you insist; its the "umauma lei", prounounced "ew-mow-ma lay".
The Master Q was kind enough to work on one of my photos and give me a quick lesson on how to do what he did. Here is his version of the orangespine unicorn fish.
Strange fish with peculiar defenses. Colorful little thing though!
ReplyDeletepoor guy has to live with that handle... both versions. :)
ReplyDeleteIridescent tropical colors on this interesting little fish. Nice captures, that UW housing you have opens up a whole other world to be photographed for sure!
ReplyDeleteI'm not a master, I'm just a grasshopper. I hope nobody laughing when they hear you calling me a master. Lol. I can see you are working pretty hard on this trip to captured on land and under water for us. So, how many more pictures you have to work on?
ReplyDeleteWow! A few tweaks and what a difference!
DeleteAll in all Cheryl and I took 13,949 photos this last trip but you can figure about half of those are nothing. I took about 3000 underwater photos just trying to get use to the new set up and how everything worked. They were also taken in the water in front of the condo where the water was merkier so most of those were pretty useless.
DeleteIf I think I need or want to take a photo of something one shot is never good enough. If I take one shot I normally take 6-10 shots so there are a lot of repeats in my shots, all with just a little different lighting or focal length, etc.
Even with all of that I still have quite a few photos left to post so you will be seeing them for a while! LOL