April 12, 2013 — There’s no getting away from it: your average monkfish looks seriously badass. To all intents and purposes it’s just one giant head, supported by an after-thought of a body and capped with a cavernous mouth fringed with razor-sharp teeth. If that isn’t the kind of thing to keep you awake at night, you’re a braver person than me. Or possibly another monkfish.
Also known as the goosefish, these bottom-dwelling Atlantic fish use their pectoral fins to ‘walk’ along the seabed until they find a spot to their liking, at which point they half-bury themselves in the sediment and use a fishing ‘lure’ at the end of a long antenna to tempt potential prey to their fate.
But when New England fishermen began finding the remains of birds called dovekies (Arctic seabirds that are the smallest members of the puffin family) in the stomachs of monkfish they had caught – well, that was something of a surprise. For one thing, although predation of birds by fish (or, for that matter, by cephalopods) is not without precedent, there remains little understanding of how frequently it occurs.
Stomach studies of New England fish caught on research cruises show that spiny dogfish, Atlantic herring, pollock, Atlantic cod, red hake, and fourspot flounder also eat birds; and it’s reasonable to infer that something called the goosefish might have avian tastes. But monkfish generally feed at depths well outside the range of dovekies, which can dive to about 100 feet in pursuit of small fish, crustaceans and zooplankton.
Read the full story at Discovery News