The Spotted Grubfish is a cute fish with a ugly name - we've no idea how they got it. As there aren't any grubs underwater we can only assume that they were discovered by a Mr Grub.
If you are full of a toxic poison, you don't tend to need to be very good at swimming. If fact you can let yourself go a little and just veg out in a nice comfy spot. Nothing is going to eat you after all. That's what Stars and Stripes Toadfish like to do - you invariably find them lying on the seafloor no doubt wishing they had a TV.
Female angler fish can eat a meal twice their size in one huge split-second gulp. That’s the equivalent to a human eating about 750 hamburgers. The current human record according to the International Federation of Competitive Eating (yes it exists!) is 11 in 10 minutes.
All striped catfish grow whiskers and the ladies are no exception. Even the juvenilles in their overcrowded schools have whiskers – the girls and the boys. Each school forms a pulsating ball, that hovers in the water. It can be magical to watch, but it’s not wise to get too close.
Once in a blue moon, the naming guy gets a name spot on - and there's absolutely no doubt about this one, Stripeys are definitely stripey. It's true to the Australian way of calling it like it is. They are quite a resilient species the Stripey. They like to hang out in groups and their population can double quite quickly. They can often be seen hanging under rock ledges.
Cowfish are tropical fish that sometimes end up in Sydney, they get caught in the East Australian Current like in the movie Finding Nemo. The two species most likely to end up here are the Horned Cowfish and the Thorny-Backed Cowfish.
Threebar Porcupinefish can be found all over Sydney, even in the most unlikely places. Like all Pufferfish, Toadfish and Porcupinefish, they contain a poison that is 1000 times more toxic than cyanide. Voodoo priests used a tiny dose of this poison to paralyse victims and make them appear dead. After burying them alive, they would dig them back up to create ‘the walking dead’. These fish create zombies... literally.
The Velvet Leatherjacket is a bit of a one-off in Sydney - only one has ever been identified.
There are several species of Toadfish in Sydney, but this Weeping Toadfish is one of the easiest to identify. As its name suggests, it looks like it is has been crying with tears running down its cheeks.
On first impression, the Yellowfin Scorpionfish seems to have a spectacularly bad name. It’s related to the stonefish, the world’s most venomous fish and is perfectly camouflaged with not a spot of yellow in sight.