Excitable Media: Fish: Goliath Grouper

You might think you know why all the older Goliath Groupers are male, but Dave Samuels of Sarasota, Florida has $5 that says you're wrong.

Buck Rogers was a
spearfisherman, too

Sure you know Davie, Jesse Samuels' youngest kid. Well he was only 15 when he went spearfishing for the first time. Old Solly took the kid out to find that downed tramp steamer in a sinkhole off the Sarasota coast. They had been out a while, down around 165 feet when Solly speared a cobia and headed back to the boat. And wouldn't you know? That was when Davie noticed the Goliath Grouper stalking him. To say it was a big fish would have been a considerable understatement. It was 500 lbs, and it hovered close under him like a blimp in the mirror. Davie's heart pounded beneath his wetsuit skin, and time started crawing. Hear him tell it now and he always says he remembered counting the 11 dorsal spines, so close, like sawteeth under his feet.

The Goliath charged, and fearing his knee would buckle, Davie slammed the fish in the head with the butt of his speargun. The Grouper only backed off a few feet and attacked again. I don't know how he did it, but in the split second between attacks Davie loaded his speargun and killed the fish. Later, back at school, he retold the story a million and one times: in the locker room, in the hallway . . . he was frequently found sharpening his pencil, talking it up. In fact, telling that story was how he met Michelle. Now she's his ex-wife.

Why isn't this fish smiling?

Like their human hunters, Goliath Groupers reach adolescence between the ages of 7 and 14 years (or 18 to 26 inches, whichever comes first). Unlike their human hunters, most fish in the grouper family excel at transcending the battle of the sexes. See, when they reach their adolescent phase, swimming around in middling schools rebelling and acting fishy, there are some serious hormones flowing. So much so, in fact, that the Goliath Groupers change gender completely, en masse, from female to male. The family of fish is known as protogynous hermaphrodites.

There's an old Twilight Zone episode where there's this really beautiful woman raised in a society peopled only with ugly people, and she's villified because of her not un-good looks. Its like that for Goliath Groupers that, for one reason or another, refuse to change sex with the rest of the fish. These unfortunates are ostracized from their peer Groupers. Not to say that hermaphrodites aren't beautiful, because that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm just saying how -- you know -- everything is relative.

Actually, forget all that, it's BS. Groupers don't even swim in schools. They're misanthropic (misichthystic?) ignorant loners. They hang out down by the shipwrecks, and feed off unwary crustaceans, Parrotfish, and octopi. They ambush their prey with a quick snap of the jaws, and their sharp teeth give no quarter. Teeth be damned! -- most prey is simply engulfed and swallowed whole.

Purchase this fish
badge in Australia

That reminds me. If you're ever loitering down by the wharf don't go calling them Goliath Groupers. Round here, and most everywhere, they're known by their old name: Jewfish. It wasn't because of any particular pressure put on the Committee of Names of Fishes (CNF), but they offically changed the name two years back. It was a rare case for the CNF, which changes fish names only if they "violate the tenets of good taste." (That would be "good taste" in the non-culinary sense of the word.) In fact, the Goliath Grouper is only the second time a fish has been redesignated. The first was in the late 1990s when the Squawfish of the American Northwest became the Pikeminnow.

But don't be alarmed. Daniel Nelson, a CNF offical, tells it like it is.

"People think we're going to start changing all kinds of names, like Spanish Mackerel. But that's ridiculous. This is not a domino effect."