Fish
Bonefish
Albula vulpes · also called grey ghost, banana fish
The bonefish is one of the most sought-after fish in the world, and you are not supposed to keep it. It is a silver torpedo that lives in water barely deep enough to cover it, sees everything, and runs like nothing else its size when hooked.
Overview
Albula vulpes haunts warm shallow seas worldwide, especially the Bahamas, Florida, and the Caribbean, over sand and seagrass flats and through mangrove creeks. It roots out shrimp, crabs, and worms with a downturned snout and crushes them with throat tooth plates.
The grey ghost
Its mirror-like sides reflect the bottom so well that a school can be invisible until it moves. On a rising tide it feeds head-down in water so shallow its tail breaks the surface — the “tailing” that flats anglers travel the world to see.
Built to run
Hooked, a bonefish of 2 to 3 kg tears 100 m or more across the flat at nearly 60 km/h. It can also breathe air through a lung-like swim bladder, and it hatches as a transparent ribbon-shaped leptocephalus larva, like an eel.
Status
Near Threatened and declining, with steep drops in parts of Florida tied to the loss of seagrass and mangroves. It is worth far more released than eaten, and the catch-and-release fishery is worth hundreds of millions a year.
Bonefish: common questions
Why is the bonefish such a famous sport fish if you cannot eat it?
Because the challenge and the setting are the whole point. Bonefishing on a tropical flat is close to hunting. The angler wades or poles a skiff across clear, shin-deep water, trying to spot a nearly invisible fish, then place a small fly or lure ahead of it without spooking it, because a bonefish will bolt at a bad cast, a shadow, or a heavy footfall. When one does take, it runs harder and faster for its size than almost anything in the sea. The flesh has too many small bones to be worth keeping, so the reward is the stalk, the take, and the run, and the fish is released. That combination has built a global travel industry around destinations like Andros, the Florida Keys, and Christmas Island.
How can a bonefish breathe air?
Its swim bladder, the gas-filled organ most fish use only for buoyancy, is connected to the throat by an open duct and is lined so that it can absorb oxygen directly from swallowed air, functioning as a simple lung. When a bonefish is in warm, still, shallow water where dissolved oxygen runs low, or when a falling tide briefly leaves it stranded, it can gulp air at the surface and keep its blood oxygenated. This air-breathing ability is shared with its relatives the tarpon and the ladyfish and helps explain how all of them thrive in shallow, sun-baked backwaters that would suffocate other predators.
What is a leptocephalus?
It is the strange larval form that bonefish share with true eels and tarpon. Instead of hatching as a miniature fish, the bonefish begins life as a flat, transparent, leaf or ribbon-shaped creature that drifts in open ocean currents for a month or two, feeding on dissolved organic matter and tiny particles. When it is ready to settle, it undergoes a dramatic change, and the leptocephalus actually gets smaller, its body condensing and reorganising over about a week and a half into a small, silvery juvenile bonefish that moves onto the shallow flats. This shared larval stage is one of the main reasons scientists group these fish together.
Are bonefish one species or many?
What anglers call the bonefish is really a group of closely related, almost identical species. The classic Atlantic and Caribbean fish is Albula vulpes, but genetic work has shown that bonefish around the world, and even some in the same region, belong to a dozen or so separate species that look nearly the same and were long treated as one. This matters for conservation, because a fishery collapse or a habitat loss in one area may be hitting a species with a small range rather than a single global population, and the Florida bonefish decline has focused attention on exactly that question.