Rabbits of the sea [Late post]

[this is a late post, composed in May 2013 and only published now!]

May is the time for baby rabbitfish.

Everywhere on the lagoon of Ipan, I found large schools of juvenile rabbitfish, nibbling away at the seagrass. It's the annual "run" of the babies, migrating from the open ocean towards the reef flat and lagoons, where the lucky few mature into adults (the rest are eaten by other fish -- and by humans too).

Both baby and adult rabbitfish are highly sought after for eating. In the Philippines, the baby rabbitfish or padas are easily harvested in the thousands using seines or bag nets. The padas are then turned into very good fish bagoong (=fermented fish paste). I read that baby rabbitfish need to be harvested before they reach the seagrass meadows, because once they start feeding on seagrass the taste turns bitter.

The adult rabbitfish are also good to eat. In the Philippines they're fried, grilled, in sinigang, and butterflied open and salted and dried. The adults are not called padas anymore - they're known as danggit, samaral, barangen, kitang, or a whole bunch of other names - depending on the language and on the species. They're caught using v-shaped fish corrals (baklad) that trap migrating adults into a narrow area where they can be scooped out with a net. Fishermen know that the adults have to migrate from the reef flat to deeper waters so they can reproduce, so they set up their baklad to catch all they can during that time of year.

While good to eat and high priced, it's not really sustainable to intensively harvest both the babies AND the reproductive spawners of the same species. Especially when you have so many baklad on the reef flat that hardly any of the spawners can survive to reproduce. In fact, huge declines have been reported in rabbitfish catched in various parts of the Philippines. And by huge declines, I mean catches that are less than half what they used to be... and still plummeting.

Here on Guam, the baby rabbitfish are called mañåhak, the adults are known as sesyon or hiteng. In between their baby and adult stages, they're known as dagge'.

On Guam two species are common: Siganus argenteus (hiteng), which is plain and silvery with a forked
tail, and Siganus spinus (sesyon), which has a scribbly pattern. You can see both species in this photo:

(I think the S. argenteus is bigger because it migrated from the ocean slightly sooner than S. spinus).

One cool thing about rabbitfish is that they can change color! When a school swims over bare sand or rock, it's grey-silver in color, and when it's amongst seagrass the color subtly shifts to green! It's difficult to photography, but can you kinda see the difference?

 

 

I know it doesn't look like much in photos, but in real life it's actually really pretty.  It may not be a very dramatic color change like you'd see in an octopus, but I'd like to see YOU to try to do better than the rabbitfish!

I don't know how much harvesting is going on here on Guam. Are rabbitfish overharvested here, too?