Is there really a four eyed butterfly fish?
His name suggests a summer garden, dressed in sunny colors, decked with visiting bees and fluttering butterflies. The four eyed butterfly fish lives up to his name in every respect, though he has no butterfly wings and his colorful garden is under water. Sometimes this little jewel gets carried away from home by the Gulf Stream and swept far to the north. Once in a while he has been seen in the cool, grey waters of the Atlantic off Cape Cod.
There are more than 200 different butterfly fishes and each one seems prettier than all the others. Most of the varieties live in the shallow, sunny waters around the Pacific Islands. Five cousins, however, bedeck the watery gardens of coral and the shallow reefs of the mid Atlantic. We find the four eyed butterfly fish off the warm shores of Florida, Panama and Bermuda.
He is a round, flat fish somewhat like a six inch saucer. His body is fringed with spiky fins and covered with tiny, glistening scales. His main color is the palest of primrose yellows, shading to deeper tones around the edges. To this pretty picture, it looks for all the world as though someone then took a black crayon and added some decor. There is a black line from top to bottom across his face, cutting through his two little bright eyes.
This adds a daring accent to his first, and real, pair of eyes. The crayon, or so it seems, was then used to place two black dots on his golden back, just in front of his tail. These rear dots look like a second pair of eyes, one on each side of his flat body.
The dainty, four eyed butterfly fish is a meat eater. His fins, like the small, gauzy wings of an insect, take him gliding through the water in search of smaller fish and crustaceans and he also may dine on the parasites which attack much bigger fishes. Other fish and also fishermen enjoy eating the little butterfly fish and as a youngster his head is protected with bony plates of armor.
The dainty creature, of course, belongs in a garden of rainbow colors. His watery world is shallow, green blue water, filtered with dappled sunshine. The rainbow garden colors are provided by beautiful corals and the four eyed butterfly fish shares his wet wonderland with a host of gaudy relatives and jewel toned angel fishes.
The butterfly fishes, all 200 of them are classed in the Order Chaetodontoidei a very fancy name which carries a warning in Latin. It means the spiny toothed fishes. The tiny, pointed mouth of the butterfly fish is full of teeth fitted with needle sharp cusps. The butterfly of the ocean can bite.