In Texas, fishing opportunities for triggerfish are great across the coast with guides offering trips from Galveston to South Padre. The same rig with a heavier weight can be used to drop your bait down to a school of triggerfish in deeper waters. This allows anglers to use spinning or baitcasting gear to cast their bait to the edge of floating cover where these aggressive fish will strike. The best bait for triggerfish is tiny pieces of cut bait made from squid, shrimp, or baitfish attached to tiny hooks.Ī typical triggerfish rig is a small weight at the end of 15lb test line with three or more small hooks spaced out above it. Triggerfish feed on crabs, mussels, sea urchins, and anything they can break with their teeth and fit in their mouths. When the temperatures drop, they head down to reefs, wrecks, and other hard-bottom habitats. During warmer months, these fish will be found under floating beds of seaweed. Triggerfish will often form large schools and hang out near cover in nearshore or offshore waters. Typically these fish will stay fairly small, reaching a common length of 17 inches and weighing about five pounds. Gray triggerfish are a drab olive to gray color and grow to a maximum length of 28 inches and over 13 pounds. The most popular triggerfish species is the gray triggerfish, which is most abundant in the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean, and the Caribbean. Small jigs or bait rigs are two of the most popular and effective approaches for getting a bite from these unique fish. Triggerfish have a small mouth which means small hooks are crucial to getting hooked up. Spearfishing is usually limited by water clarity but using conventional gear requires anglers to use the proper tackle. Female triggerfish build their nests in rough proximity on ocean bottoms from 4 meters to 45 meters deep where they guard and aerate the eggs (which hatch very quickly and disseminate the little larval fish throughout the oceans.Fishing for triggerfish is usually done with a conventional rod and reel setup or with a spear. they are preyed on by sailfish, mahi-mahi, large sea birds, and other such predators (and by rapacious humans, of course). Like many pelagic fish (but unlike most other triggerfish) these fish seem to assemble in loose schools to travel the oceans. Reef triggerfish are opportunistic feeders and so, it seems are spotted oceanic triggerfish which can be carnivorous or planktivorous depending on the circumstances (although they seem to specialize in hunting smaller fish). Although they can grow to half a meter (20 inches) in length, adults are more commonly 35 centimeters (14 inches) long. The fish are silver or gray with little pale dots of blue or white. It can be found in the Pacific Ocean from Japan across to Hawaii and to the California and South American coasts. This is Canthidermis maculata aka “the spotted oceanic triggerfish”, a medium-sized triggerfish which has a worldwide distribution in temperate oceans from New York to London, down around the Cape of Good Hope and then across the Indian Ocean to the Gulf of Thailand. Except today we are writing about a triggerfish which left the colorful, frenetic cities of the coral reef and evolved to live in the vast open ocean. Examples of this literally make up the history of life on the planet, but today I want to talk about one of my favorite families of fish, Balistidae, the triggerfish, the cunning, clever, and truculent nast5ers of the coral reef environment. Something which fascinates me is when a very successful species is so successful that it evolves away from its original habitat into a new niche.
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