Barramundi - Marine life in El Nido
Every week, we gonna post a description of one of our favorite creature we can encounter here. Enjoy
Marine life in El Nido - Barramundi - One of our favorite fish in El Nido!
Marine life in El Nido – Barramundi is part of the grouper family, and can also be called the Humpback Grouper or the Panther Grouper. The name is Aboriginal for “large-scaled silver fish.” It can grow up to 70cm and you can find this fish in the Indo-West Pacific tropical waters. It is not easy to spot this fish here but you might have more luck finding it at sunrise or sunset. It has a very strange body shape as you can see on the picture which makes it very recognizable from other fishes.
It is a solitary predator who eats mainly small fishes and crabs and sometimes babies of their own species! It is a hermaphrodite animal. This means it can be born a female and become a male or the opposite. Big ones are usually the females.
Genus: cromileptes
Depth: 2 to 40m
Diet: carnivore
Size: 70 centimeters
Barramundi - Adult and Juvenile
The adults have a grey color with brown spots and black dots covering the entire body. The juvenile is very beautiful because they have a white body with black spots a bit like a dalmatian. They only swim vertically with their head down. Virtually all barramundi are born male. They will then turn into females when they are three to four years old. This means the female can only be courted by younger men!
Barramundi - Protection
Barramundi Cods are a threatened species. Because of their beauty, people like to buy them to keep them as a pet in an aquarium which reduces the number of barramundis living in the wild. So please, if you want to make a fish&chips, do not choose the Barramundi !