September 1 is the first day of opening the sea, and after four long months of waiting, foodies finally usher in the second bloom of their lives in a year (spring has already bloomed once).
The red flag on the Port Luan Wharf (small red flags are planted on fishing boats), the crowd is crowded, and it is among them, just like the game of "oiling" played when I was a child, and I squeezed out the sweat in a while. I was being carried forward by a crowd of people, and i happened to be in front of a fishing boat that had just docked, and the owner of the boat was carrying a cage of baskets of fish off the boat.
Filament goby
There was a basket of small fish that were alive and bouncing, a fish I had never seen before: the body was yellow-green with red, and there were five or six dark brown stripes on the side of the body, which were not much longer than chalk; the cheeks were slightly bulging, and the cheeks and gills were scattered with bright blue dots; the eyes were long on the top of the head, close together. They jump, support their dorsal fins, tear each other apart, and look very fierce (even if they are difficult to protect themselves from the water, they still do not forget to attack their opponents, which is the real "battle fish family"!). ）。 I asked what kind of fish it was, and the fisherman didn't know, but said that this fish was fried and eaten very deliciously, and the price was twenty yuan a catty. This surprised me a little, to know that the size of the jade tendon fish (Huangxian dialect called "noodle fish") only sells for four or five dollars a pound, sea crucian carp (scientific name spotted plover, the famous Japanese small muscle sushi is made of it) is only about five dollars, braided root (scientific name catfish, Huangxian dialect called "braided fish", "braided root" refers to the pigtail fish that has not grown up) or even for one or two dollars, why is this nameless small fish so expensive? Puzzled, I took a picture of them, ready to ask for advice on their ins and outs.
I sent the photo to a classmate in Kuwa island, she came from a fisherman's family, grew up with a wide range of seafood, all kinds of seafood, but she also said that she had never seen this fish. It seems that I have only figured it out for myself.
Mudskippers
Based on the shape of the fish's head, mouth, body shape, and their posture when fighting, I thought of the mudskipperS that I had seen on TELEVISION, and although the mudskippers looked gray-headed, like a mason, with a pair of frog eyes, and blue dots all over their bodies, the appearance of the two was quite different, but I felt that they were still a bit godlike. Looking up the Chinese fauna, the mudskipper is a genus of gobys in the family Goby, which does not have the nameless small fish I want to find, but it strengthens my judgment, because the fish and shrimp named after the "tiger" often have the same horizontal stripes as tigers, such as tiger sharks, tiger fish, and sea goby shrimp, which is consistent with the horizontal stripes on the nameless small fish, and it is almost certain that it is a fish of the goby family. Goby (old writing goby) is the largest family of marine fish, there are more than 1480 species of 196 genera, China produces about 40 genera of more than 120 species, through careful comparison, I finally found the figure of the nameless small fish, it should belong to the silk goby genus, the scientific name of the filament goby, commonly known as the silk goby, filament monkey shark: slender body, head, body are flattened; the eyes are small and located on the dorsal margin; the body is pale olive color, the head is scattered with blue dots; the snout is short, blunt; the first dorsal fin has dark spots, and the second dorsal fin and tail fin have pale red transverse bands. In contrast to the photographs, these features all coincide, and its first dorsal fin spines are elongated and filamentous, which is why it got its name.
Gobies inhabit shallow sea areas with near-shore intertidal zones or sediments and rocky reefs, inland bays and river-sea confluences (the "catfish head" in the population of Huangxian County, which is a kind of gobies), and some species also live in freshwater (there is a kind of "Pulagar" in the mountain rivers in southern Huangxian County, which is also a kind of goby). The most prominent morphological feature of gobies is that the left and right ventral fins merge into one, forming a suction cup-like structure, which is an evolution to adapt to the living environment, when the big wave hits or the rapids impact, the goby can be tightly adsorbed on the rock and not washed away. Filament goby is a warm and warm coastal small fish, body length of 89 cm, inhabit the coastal sediment bottom sea area, with large flexor feet and small shrimp such as hook shrimp, fine crawfish and other staple food (like to eat shrimp and tiger stripes, so the name of "shrimp tiger"), and also eat algae, crab larvae and baby fish, etc., is a meat-based omnivorous fish.
Another interesting feature of the filament goby is that it likes to coexist with the gun shrimp. Gun shrimp is also known as drum shrimp, Huangxian dialect is called "sandwich shrimp", Huangxian sea area is mainly a distinct drum shrimp and Japanese drum shrimp two kinds, there is a large point of two clips, small clips for eating, large clips with self-defense, large clips on the upper part of the movable fingers and immovable fingers, movable fingers on the club, not moving fingers on the molars, when the two fingers suddenly close, the movable fingers on the pestle into the molars of the immovable fingers, will shoot out a high-speed water flow of up to hundreds of kilometers per hour, just like pulling the trigger to fire a bullet. This shock wave causes the water pressure to drop sharply in a short period of time, forming blisters in an instant, which is called "cavitation phenomenon" in biology, and the energy of the shock wave is enough to stun or kill the small fish and shrimp in front of the shrimp claws. As the pressure returns to normal, the bursting of the blisters will make a "crackling" sound, like a drum, which is the origin of the name "gun shrimp" and "drum shrimp". But the drum shrimp eyes are not very good, need someone to provide it with early warning, although the filament goby is fierce, but it is too small, to defend their territory also need to find a helper. The filament goby originally fed on shrimp, but the drum shrimp was quite large, wrapped in hard armor, and carried a pistol, and the two were evenly matched, and they all needed to huddle together for warmth, so they could only coexist peacefully and live together.
Filament goby and drum shrimp
Filament goby is responsible for watching the enemy material sentry, drum shrimp will clean the sediment to keep the cave open, whenever there is danger, the filament goby will swing its tail to inform its companions, in a pinch the drum shrimp will come to a shot, the filament goby is equivalent to finding a nanny part-time bodyguard, in biology, this is called "symbiotic relationship".
Filament goby relatively still prefer relatively warm seas, Huangxian sea is not its traditional habitat, which is why The fishermen of Sang Island do not know it, and now the Yellow County sea can also catch filament goby, is this one of the signs of climate warming?
Some of the pictures are quoted from the Internet, and the copyright belongs to the original author