Longnose Hawkfish

Photo: Mark Rosenstein · CC BY-NC

Longnose hawkfish perch on the tips of large sea fans and black coral branches in Forbes Bay, using their elongated snouts to pick copepods and small crustaceans from the polyp surface while their pectoral fins grip the coral structure with the dexterous precision that gives hawkfish their name. They are protogynous hermaphrodites — born female and capable of transitioning to male — and dominant males maintain harems of three to seven females on adjacent coral heads, displaying to rivals with rapid gill-cover flaring. Their dependence on large, healthy sea fans as perch sites makes their presence an excellent indicator of the ecosystem's structural age and the absence of destructive fishing gear.