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Blue Parrotfish — printable fact sheet
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Blue Parrotfish
Scarus coeruleus
A parrotfish's beak is not a beak: it is a mass of teeth fused into a cutting plate, and behind it, in the throat, sits a second set of pharyngeal teeth that works like a mill. The blue parrotfish scrapes algae and the thin turf growing on and in dead coral rock, swallows the ro…
Did you know?
- A significant portion of the white sandy beaches in the Caribbean is made up of parrotfish-generated sand produced from their digestion of coral.
- Parrotfish mostly eat algae, not living coral, and their grazing is what stops seaweed from smothering a reef — which is why reefs where parrotfish are heavily fished tend to flip to algal dominance and fail to recover from bleaching. The mucus cocoon takes about half an hour to build and the fish will build a new one every night. Its scientific name, Scarus coeruleus, simply means "blue parrotfish", and the adult male's forehead bump grows more pronounced with age.
What I learned
Draw the blue parrotfish
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