Short Bigeye

 

Both photos by P Carl

   Today I got another lifer and it was a tropical fish that most certainly got caught up and took a ride on the Gulf Stream. The species is known as a Short Bigeye. They get to twelve inches or so. When they are adults they live in six hundred feet of water on the Continental Shelf in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. It stands to reason that the big eye is so they can find food in the deep  almost dark water of the deep

   As with many of these southern species, I had never heard about them until a couple weeks ago. They have been showing up in Rhode Island and on Facebook. Apparently, enough got swept up the coast that people have been running into them.

   Thursday I got a phone call from my friend Carlos that he was seeing a bright orange tropical fish. I had remembered seeing this fish on Facebook and sent a photo to him and my friend Sue and that is what they thought they saw.

 

Today I went to the mudflats looking for birds and hoping the fish were there. I brought my seine just in case. Myself, Sue, Carlos, and another birder named Carl caught six of them in one swoop of the seine. We took a bunch of photos though mine are terrible. Luckily, Carl took a lot of photos and many came out great. The two photos in this post are his.

   Juvenile tropical fish end up dying when the water temps drop in the fall. They don't have a chance to make it back into warm water. Because of this, the fish we caught today were donated to a local aquarium. This way the fish get a second chance at life and the public gets to see them.

Saw two new birds today. Up to 372 species.