“Mystery Specimen” Identified As Fish Bone
A “mystery specimen” was found at Clearwater Beach earlier this year has been determined to be the jaw of a very large Parrotfish.
The most recent Bermuda Zoological Society newsletter said, “A mystery specimen was found by snorkelers as they approached the beach at Clearwater earlier this year.
“At first glance their find was thought to be from the mouth of a fish that grinds its food – an eagle ray perhaps?
“However, Nigel Pollard, captain of the Endurance, pointed out that the rows of grinding structures in the mouth of an eagle ray are more like linear or chevron-shaped plates, and those of our mystery specimen are individual rounded structures.
“To answer the question of what our specimen is, we turned to a colleague at the Florida Museum of Natural History who told us that our, “Specimen is from a very large Parrotfish [Family - Scaridae].
“The element is the lower pharyngeal grinder [jaw], but, unfortunately, without comparing our specimen, physically, with his reference specimens, he wasn’t able to identify it to genus and species.”
- Photo courtesy of BAMZ Image Collection
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Category: All, Environment
They could have asked Bumpy’s bies or Burp’s or Craig Trott (St. George’s
Wont be buying a bag of fillet from dem!!
@ nahfish, Good one. LMAO
But if you have bought fish locally then you’ve probably bought it from some other fisherman anyway Lol.
The meat isn’t that great as filets, plus parrot fish are quite rightly protected now but years ago when we would be hauling jacks etc… we would get them in the nets sometimes. If they got ‘strung/gilled’ and died we would keep a few, knock the sides off and salt them down as they make awesome fishcakes. Of course we release them now though
Parrotfish tastes well. Like hogfish. Because it’s sometimes blueish or reddish or greenish and illegal it’s now mostly wasted in chowder. Thank god that it’s only a few who still use fish pots and supplement their income with “seaweed” and “derealting” and killing anything that moves in the ocean. The same guys who go crazy about the blue halo because they’re worried about the eye in the sky more than they’re worried about Fisheries or the Cop Shop or miles of water that they’ll never venture into.