Reef fish places sloppy kisses on corals before consuming them

WASHINGTON: A kiss from a colorful reef fish called a tubelip wrasse is no one’s idea of romance, being so full of slime and suction, but it is perfectly suited for eating a hazardous diet using one of the animal kingdom’s most unique feeding strategies.

Scientists on Monday described for the first time how the fish thrives in the Indian Ocean and central-western Pacific as one of the few creatures capable of dining on corals, one of the planet’s most difficult menu items.

Corals are marine organisms boasting thin, mucuscovered flesh that contains venomous, stinging cells spread over a razor-sharp skeleton. Of the more than 6,000 fish species that live on reefs, only about 128 eat corals. Scientists knew that the yellow-and-purple tubelip wrasse was one of them, but how it did it was a mystery.

The researchers used a scanning electron microscope to determine the structure of its fleshy, poutylooking lips and high-speed video to learn what it does while feeding. “Kissing the mucus and flesh of corals with self-lubricating lips was not what we were expecting,” said marine biologist Víctor Huertas of James Cook University in Australia. The thick lips of the fish, were found to be made of a tightly packed series of thin folds of tissue.