It’s Fish Friday!
Have you ever seen the striped trumpeter in action?
Check out this beautiful footage taken off the Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania by one of our staff. As part of Darryn’s PhD thesis at the University of Tasmania - IMAS, she paired seafloor characteristics calculated from WASSP multibeam echosounder data with the locations of fish sightings using a USBL system to make species-habitat associations.
The striped trumpeter (Latris lineata) is a beautiful species with three dark olive-green stripes along the upper side, an indistinct band along the lower side, and a dark stripe from the snout to the dorsal-fin origin. They can reportedly grow up to 1.2 metres in length and up to 25 kilograms in weight. Living up to 43 years, a single fish can produce 100,000 eggs. Females reach maturity at around 5 years of age and males reach maturity at around 8 years old. Larvae go through an extended larval phase of around nine months before settling on inshore reefs, whilst adult fish mainly inhabit deep offshore waters up to 300 metres.
For more on effective approaches for surveying fish in her paper “A Systematic Review of Remotely Operated Vehicle Surveys for Visually Assessing Fish Assemblages” please click here.
Are there any trumpeters near you?
