Page 352 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
Usually about a foot and a half long, this fish has a delicious flavour,
like a mixture of bonito and mackerel, and at times the rainbow-
runners followed us in such numbers that Asbjorn once was told to
stop when he had caught a dozen in a few minutes. More than once
we saw the rainbow-runners in the closest company with the
sharks; in fact it happened that a man-size shark would swim along
the side of Tigris with one rainbow-runner escorting him on either
side, and they stuck so close to his side that it looked as if all three
fishes were fastened together.
The trigger-fish, in contrast, was the comedian of the sea. It was
clumsy in shape and looked silly swimming, as if more at home in a
glass bowl. This species is in fact supposed by marine biologists to
be a shallow-water fish living in reefs. But they surely did not live
up to their reputation, for here they came to join us in the open sea
and swam along with us ten thousand feet above the ocean floor.
The first one we saw was like a strange bubble moving aimlessly on
the surface, which proved to be the round white mouth of a stocky,
speckled little fish. Short and tall it swam in a comical way, with
curtain-like fins on back and belly waving left and right but always
at the same time and towards the same sides, like wings out of place.
This funny creature had difficulty in keeping up with our speed in
good wind and sometimes fell over sideways like a drunkard in its
eagerness not to lose us.
There are some thirty kinds of trigger-fish and some of them are
poisonous, so we never tasted the two types that kept us company.
Thus their representatives had risen to incredible numbers by the
time we reached Africa. They flippered along deep and high and
competed with the sea-hares in grazing on our lawn. When Tigris
rolled in high seas they sometimes had the grass in their mouth and,
reluctant to let it go, were pulled out of the water, fell on their backs,
but waved themselves right side up again to come back for another
bite. The largest we measured was twelve and a half inches long, but
most were the size of an open hand. When caught they could
control their own colours, showing round blue spots all over that
otherwise were hardly discernible. But their speciality was to
manipulate the trigger that gave them their name. Leather-skinned
all over, they have a soft fin on the back and in front of it are two,
sometimes three, long spines. The foremost of these is the longest
and can be raised and locked in a vertical position, so that the fish
may hold itself firmly in protective crevices. With all the force of
our fingers we could not bend or unlock this long spine. But if we
touched the trigger, the smaller spine just behind the long one, the
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