A pelagic stage frogfish, inflated and loose-skinned, unlike anything the settled fish becomes.
A small frogfish in its pelagic stage, quite unlike the animal it becomes. The skin is loose and inflated, standing away from the body as a baggy transparent envelope, and the fish inside it is pale with dark blotches or, in some, almost white. The pectoral and pelvic fins are already limb-like and are held out from the body, and the first dorsal spine is present but short. The illicium and its lure, which carry so much of the adult’s identification, are undeveloped.
The inflated skin is thought to work as a flotation and defence arrangement at once: it adds volume without weight, and it makes a small fish awkward to swallow. Animals at this stage drift rather than swim and are met in open water on blackwater dives, most often in the upper part of the column. The stage is short, and settlement onto the bottom brings a rapid change to the compact, camouflaged form.
Species and genus cannot usually be taken from a photograph of a pelagic-stage animal, and records are kept at family level. Not every small frogfish met in open water belongs here either, because some of the related frogfishes brood their young rather than releasing them into the plankton, and a settled juvenile blown off the bottom looks nothing like a pelagic-stage animal.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
