April 4, 2018
This post takes you on a snorkeling adventure with horn and tope sharks, and reveals some of the drama fish engage in under the sea.
Reports at the time of this snorkel had been touting sightings of multiple sevengill sharks… not only at the place I’ve seen them before (say, 40 feet down after a big kick-out to a distant buoy), but also in the shallows.
If I hadn’t seen video I might’ve questioned these stories… but the video evidence was too hard to ignore, so on Monday I gave it a shot after dropping the kids off at school. I didn’t see any sevengills, but I did see a couple of horn sharks and a nice big tope shark, though that tope shark was in deeper water with lower visibility.
Note the fish drama: it took me awhile to work out what I had witnessed, but with time and research, I believe that the fish drama I captured was of two transitioning California Sheepheads that are transitioning from female to male. This occurs with every such fish around about age 7 or 8. See Courtship and Spawning Behavior in the California Sheephead, Semicossyphus Pulcher (Pisces: Labridae) for detailed information on this particular territorial behavior, especially among California Sheephead, and see also these photographic examples of what it looks like when a female starts to make that transition. The gray Sheephead, in particular, had me puzzled because most photos only show the orange female and the gray-white-and-orange males, but certainly there is an in-between phase during which that transition is happening. I believe I captured two fish in the midst of that transition, based on territorial behaviors typically displayed by males, not females.
Unrelated, but I think the other fish (kelp bass and opaleyes) just hanging around observing the “fight” are hilarious. Just like people watching a fight. And when I swim up they kinda scatter like the cops just rolled up.
