Bob Fenner site, FAMA, flawed info

[agilis]

In the question below about Harlequin Basslet size, a discrepancy among sources was mentioned. There was a considerable difference between two authorities in the maximum size of the fish in question. Because the figure quoted from the Fenner site seemed so out of line with my own experience, I went to that site and did some reading. I read only a few sections, describing fishes and topics with which I am most familiar.

In my opinion, there are a number of errors within that site, some of them significant. I would be very careful about accepting as gospel everything mentioned there. Overall, it is a very
entertaining site, but should not be regarded as definitive in any way. I have never met Mr. Fenner, and know him only through his articles in FAMA.

FAMA is one of my favorite magazines, but it, like most magazines, runs articles that contain errors. There is, I think, little or no editorial review for accuracy of content. Most of what is printed is good, solid stuff, but some of it is really way off base, idiosyncratic, even bizarre at times.

As has been pointed out many times, don't believe everything you read. This makes life difficult for aquarists of limited experience, who get conflicting information not only from magazine articles and websites, but also from local fish dealers. There is no substitute for caution and experience.

[Corax]

Everyone makes errors, perhaps someone observed something anomolous and took that as the norm? I personally cannot say... What I can say, is that Mr. Fenner is one of the most respected authorities in this hobby and I've no intention of disputing what he has to say ;)

[RTR]

Bob Fenner has done many highly positive things for the hobby, but when he gets into descriptions and nomenclature, I tune out and skip the article. Some months back he ran a small article on FW/BW puffers with more misses than hits.

[agilis]

I agree with RTR. I emailed Mr. Fenner about multiple fish ID errors in an article of his in FAMA a few months ago, and he was professional enough to eventually email me in return, acknowledging the errors. I have seen this sort of thing on other occasions, and in the website.

There are no high priests in this field, or any other. There are, to my certain and personal knowledge, some real charlatans, con artists, and ignoramuses in the aquarium field. Some of these people have venerable reputations. Some even have their name attached to various fish. I do not include Bob Fenner among them. I simply point out that there are sometimes significant lapses in his material, particularly in the area of fish description/identification. No big deal. I mention it only because errors have a tendency to compound themselves, being repeated by others who accept anything in print as fact.

[Boogiechillin]

http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/SpeciesSummary.cfm?ID=3350&genusname=Serranus&speciesname=tigrinus

[agilis]

I do not claim to be an expert. I have, on the other hand, spent a lot of time underwater observing fish.

I very strongly suspect that the reference in the preceeding post, giving 29 centimeters, or almost 12 inches, as the length of that Serranus tigrinus, is an error or a misprint. I could easily be mistaken. There are many strange things in the sea. but a foot long Harlequin Basslet would be an astonishing sight. It would not really be a basslet, it would be more like a bass, or a grouper.

I also suspect that the hyperlinked site describing the pictured fish as 29 cm in length is the source of Mr. Fenner's data. My statements in my earlier post reflected my own direct observations. My reference books all confirm that experience. John Randall's Caribbean Reef Fishes is among the most reliable, and I recommed it to any serious aquarist. Websites are useful, but notoriously unreliable.

I have never seen a Harlequin Basslet much over 5 inches, and I must say that I never expect to.

[Boogiechillin]

My point was just that Fenner (and most other marine writers) get a lot of their "demographic" type information about fish species through FishBase. If it's wrong there, then it's going to be copied incorrectly by a lot of other people as well. I've seen one harlequin that was a good 6" at a LFS in Virginia Beach, but the few others that I have seen were around 3-4"...certainly nothing that would suggest a foot long harlequin is possible.

[agilis]

I've emailed FishBase to get some clarification about that photo, and the data accompanying it. When I audited a course in ichthyology, we were taught three primary measurments for length; "SL", or standard length, "TL", for total length, and "FL" for fork length.

I generally use SL, which ignores the caudal fin and measures to the end of the vertebral column, near the caudal peduncle. So do most field workers, because of the potentially misleading impression caused by including fins when reporting measurement. Fins can be damaged or missing, and some fish have markedly extended fins, even a few with streamers of various kinds. Fork length is usually used by ichthyologists in place of standard length when the end of the vertebral column in hard to find, as with a very small fish. I notice, significantly perhaps, that FL is the mode used with that photo.

Most hobbyists and lay observers use total length, including the tail, or caudal, fin, and this can account for the difference between a 5 inch measurement (SL / FL) and a 6 inch measurement (TL), for the same fish.

[FISH WHISPERER]

Hi,

I know this has been buried for awhile, but it really caught my interest. I have met Bob, and he's probably not the least like anybody would expect. He's a most jovial, nice and totally down-to-earth person. Fact is, he'd rather have a beer with ya than act all stuffy. I was doing a bunch of work on the longhorn cowfish a few years back, and most of the "conflicting thoughts" I was receiving were from people contradicting me who had absolutely no practical experience of their own. Thus, I invented a lovely term called "parrot advice." :D It needs no explanation - ya'll are smart enough to figure it out. Anyway, when I ran into Bob in Sacramento at the 2000 WMC he explained that he has a staff of people compiling data - and acknowledged that the info on the longhorn cow was hardly "precise" because there are so many different sub-species of the "boxfish."

Like somebody above posted, we have to be quite open-minded when it comes to "what we read." Certainly Bob can't be dishing out preciseness with all those fish I.D.s. Who has lived long enough to document all the specifics of so many different species of fish? ;)

What he does is try to offer some sort of guideline - based on research and species history. He's certainly not going to nail down everything. That's what's so neat about this hobby. It is totally in its infancy, with major changes occuring every few years since the '70s. We are all the time retaining new fish/corals which previously had not been kept in captivity. We are keeping fish/corals alive longer. We are learning biology all the time. This hobby is so dynamic, but that's one of the neat things about it. There's a lot of stuff out there we haven't kept, and that we don't have intense studies on.

Bob is a most gracious guy, and he knows there is far more that we don't know than there is what we do know about marine life.

Books are great guides. But even better than that is if you can find a few folks online who have actually kept a fish you have questions about. Who knows! You might actually be contributing to the next "description caption" of a fish I.D. book! :D

Cheers

[agilis]

If I understand Fishwhisperer's meaning, "parrot advice" is what you get from sources with no direct experience. I agree, and I think that is part of the problem with a lot of sites, including Fenner's. I am not sure where the "staff of people compiling data" are getting their information from, but if it is from other secondary and tertiary sources, you can expect that many inaccuracies will be repeated.

I generally restrict my comments to subjects with which I am directly familiar. I commented on the Halequin Bass issue because I have some direct experience, collecting them and keeping them.

Terms like "boxfish" are vague, and not strictly defined, but in my experience cowfish, long-horned or otherwise, are generally called trunkfish. Porcupine fish, burrfish, and a few others are usually what I think of as boxfish. Some trunkfish have a boxy shape, but the main difference between trunkfishes and boxfishes, strictly defined, is the presence of a hard bony carapace in the former, and a soft flexible body in the latter.

I am sure that Mr. Fenner is a very nice guy, but if I were doing serious research on long-horned cowfish, I would prefer that my sources had relevant qualifications. I have been collecting and keeping trunkfishes and boxfishes, including Atlantic and Caribbean Cowfish, for more than 30 years. I have seen many hundreds, and raised a few from beanfish size to softball dimensions. I know the family well, but I do not consider myself to be an expert, because I have not approached the study of these creatures in a systematic, scientific manner. I have never dissected any, studied stomach contents, internal sexual organs, taken careful measurements, kept careful records, and the like. I am just an amature aquarist, but my opinions and information were acquired honestly, first-hand. If I pass along anything I've learned from a book or from someone else's experience, I will say so. It's called citing sources.

[FISH WHISPERER]

Hi Agilis,

Well, kinda sorta. ;) In regards to the "parrot advice." That's basically what I refer to as any advice that people pass down without having first hand knowledge themselves. Like if somebody were to read my article on longhorn cowfish and pass on anything they had read - it would just be parrot advice. I'm no expert either. I don't believe the hobby is old enough to have any experts. :D And when somebody passes on conclusive findings - it's still "parrot advice." You are most correct. Parrot advice gets quite disseminated as it travels down the wire.

You see the term "boxfish" used in quotes? That's because most people think of "boxfish" when it comes to the longhorn cowfish. In a direct letter to Bob, I spelled this out, and said I thought the longhorn cow was getting a bad rap due to it's being classified so frequently as a "boxfish" as in the "BOXFISH FAQS." I believe the actual letter is on the web because I came across it when testing a new search engine. At first I thought I might be famous, :D but alas, it was just something I had typed on someone else's webpage. ;) lol

Anyway - even though we refer to ourselves as "amateurs" in the study of a particular type of fish, we can be far more experienced than somebody compiling information from dated sources. Getting "bad info," misleading info or other incorrect data is all part of the hobby - because it's a total learning environment. We don't really have a majoral concrete "knowledge" base to draw from. WE are the ones "figuring stuff out" as we go along. One of those things I had never seen written was the actual compatibility of longhorns with other fish. Toxin release? Much "warned about" but was it ever actually tested? I found nothing but "parrot advice" and much of it was clearly from incorrect sources.

I could still be way "off base" when I reported (and when I look back know I think I did it in too "knowing" a manner ;) ) that cowfish were a threat only after their liver "burst" and released toxins in the tank.. Heck, I don't even know if that's true. Having acquired two cows on their deathbed at the lfs (I was sort of on a "call me" wait) I actually let them die, decay and be consumed in a fish tank - and no other fish died. So, perhaps even the "bursting liver in a tank syndrome" is largely mythical. I'm not sure. But that's what's so neat about this hobby... We are actually "discovering" things each and every years. Yesterday's "can't keep" corals are now commonplace. We're making advances on captive breeding, and raising fry.

I do hope I didn't come across with a purpose of "defending" Bob Fenner. ;) I'm was just trying to make a point that there are precious few sources we can "take at face value." At least these folks are great references and guides. But there's going to be errors found every year we progress. It seemed like there was frustration in the initial thread that these guys shouldn't be sharing "bad info." I don't think that's their intent - it's just the extent of the knowledge they had at the time. And to a lot of folks, it's better than nothing. It's going to be up to people like yourself to "get the right word out." You may not get the fancy book deal, ;) but we have just as big an audience (if not larger) in these forums. We'll be way off base from time to time as well! Haven't we all seen it! lol But we're getting better and better all the time, and learning more by way of practical experience than we could ever hope to receive from reading a book :) Cheers!

[agilis]

I agree with most of what Fishwhisperer writes, but a few observations, if I may:

I am not sure that I agree that the hobby is in its infancy. I guess that everything is relative, but my own experience with marine fishkeeping goes way, way back, and there were some oldtimers around when I was a kid. I was very fortunate to have met the late great Bob Straughan when I was still in my teens. I learned a lot from Bob, including the fundamentals of fish collecting. Bob's book, "The Marine Aquarium in the Home" was written 45 years ago. It is still a great book, though obsolete in most technical areas. People have been keeping marine fish and invertebrates for a long, long, time. People like Bob, with only their "wet thumb", were far more successful aquarists than most technology laden contemporary aquarists. It's an art, primarily, not a science.

There have been, of course, fantastic technical advances in the past couple of decades. Much of what we now know about fish is from first hand observation, mostly thanks to scuba technology, and the realization by ichthyologists that they could not rely on trawl samples and preserved specimens. They had to get down under the water. The conversion of marine scientists to field observers is fairly recent. Some of the standard academic reference books written a long while back have many errors, mostly corrected in more recent editions.

About 10 years ago, I was reading a newly launched scuba diving magazine. In it, an article described Royal Grammas as cleaner fish, parasite pickers, like Neon Gobies. I fired off a letter to the editor, informing him that this was not so. He replied, somewhat condescendingly, that I was wrong. He quoted the premier standard reference book, (Bohlke and Chaplin, I think) in support of the cleaner-fish claim. The reference book was wrong, as anyone who has studied the fish in its habitat knows. The authors of that old book knew the fish only as a preserved specimen in a jar. The arrogant rich kid publisher/editor had simply repeated something he read in what was then the authoratative reference work.

[FISH WHISPERER]

The arrogant rich kid publisher/editor had simply repeated something he read in what was then the authoratative reference work.
And that my friend, is parroting to the 'nth degree! :D :D

Oh, and when I use the term "infancy," I do of course use it with a mix of affection, humour and reality. Certainly people have been keeping tanks for centuries, and that includes sw tanks (mostly temperate, although I'm sure a few "rich" antiques had freshly stocked "ornate" tanks in the years of yore!) :D

It is, of course, not to imply we know nothing, but I do believe if we were to scale out all the knowledge that is to be had in the marine hobby, I like to think of us as just beginning the journey - for we have far more to learn that what we already think we know. ;) Therein lies the somewhat tongue-in-cheek word "infancy." I think we had a huge spike in the learning curve in the last 7-8 years. For 12 years prior my good friend and I toiled over his sw setup at his house. All the goodies were in place, and it was indeed some maintenance. Who would have ever believed that less is better!

While we may have a grasp on this hobby, I'd like to see the day when we can captively breed/raise a lot more than the relative few species of fish we do today.