by DAVE GRANT
Dreary-mouthed, gaping wretches of the sea,
Gulping salt-water everlastingly,
Cold-blooded, though with red your blood be graced,
And mute, though dwellers in the roaring waste...
Each summer brings a new mystery to the bay, courtesy of the currents and the drift of larval fishes. Even in the dullest of summers, exotic fishes appear in the net, and this summer (1994) the "Fish of the Year" was, not surprisingly, a gypsy from the south. Although cold weather also brings arrivals from the north - the odd-looking lumpfish being the latest addition to the Hudson River's list of fishes - most of the variety is of southern origins. Also, obviously, fewer of us are out there getting wet after the weather turns cold, so there are fewer opportunities to find an eccentric northern fish in the winter.
As part of our summer ritual, we do a lot of seining. One day in early August, I knew we were on to something when students dragging a seine became excited over a fish "hugging the net." Fortunately we secured the specimen, a dark and beautiful, eel-like fish.
Wow! This was a new one on me and nothing is more exciting than finding a new fish in the bay...and nothing charges up students quicker than something that stumps the teacher. I had to think fast (To keep the fish alive AND to keep one step ahead of the students!) Into the bucket it went for the race back to the aquarium and the reference books.
Viewed from the side it immediately struck me as a remora (shark sucker). Its shape fit that general profile and it swam in a leisurely, serpentine motion, hugging vertical surfaces. It behaved as I would have guessed a remora would in a tank. It also had striking longitudinal whitish stripes and an oddly rounded tail. "Do young remoras have sucker disks?" (Dope's shrug from the crowd.) We tried to get a close look at the dark head, which was remarkably flat like a remora's. Not wanting to injure our newly-found prize, didn't dare lift it out of the water. It did not appear to have suckers on the head. We were making progress!
While the students were busy dusting off the fish identification books I tired to visualise images I'd seen in various sources. I recalled a mounted fish I'd seen on the wall of someone I had done some work for when I was in college. He was an avid fisherman from Rumson (The most Republican town in New Jersey.); "a good OL' boy from the Chesapeake" who ran a Fortune 500 company in the city, apparently to support his fishing addiction. Now this guy had more money than God, but his proudest possession was a 50-pound cobia on the wall, the first I'd ever seen. "A real 'Rottweiller' when it comes to fish." (In those days, before the big-dog craze, I'd never seen a Rottweiller either.) He was amused that I was not familiar with this "bull-dog" that is so prized down south.
"What about a cobia?", I offered. More blank stares from the students. Kind of like cows when you go "Mooo" at them.
The modern field guides were not giving us the answer - and for good reason since they typically give only a thumb-nail sketch of an adult. Our specimen was only the size of my index finger, so it was time to call in the big guns.
I contacted Dr. Dorfman (From the university formerly known as Monmouth College.) our resident ichthyologist in the summer. Now, fishermen know everything there is to know - just ask one. And the only people who know more are ichthyologists! After my description, his response was simple and to the point, "Sounds like a 'tropical' to me; perhaps a blennie. Pickle it (Put it in a jar of formaldehyde) and I'll take a look at it sometime." Well THAT wasn't going to happen to a beauty like this!
Back to the books. This was quickly becoming a Rorschach Test for fish identification, especially since there was no reference in the books to the rounded tail.Young fish are always a tough call, which is why we like to try and keep them a while to grow them out a bit. Young snappers from Florida are the worst, and we always get a few of them each summer and wait for them to triple in size before we're sure of what species they are.
The consensus was that it must be a cobia, and since I like to go with my first guess (And I'm correct about half the time.) we began to lean towards that. The students soon dubbed it "Kobi" - their variation of the German name kobia.
More sources, ichthyologists and aquarists were consulted. According to his biographer:, in contemplating his investigations on fishes, Dr. Samuel Mitchill (1764-1831) once remarked, "Show me the scale and I will point out the fish." Now we were on the right track (or so I thought); all we needed to solve the mystery was to have a look at the scales.
As luck would have it in the fish world, the cobia has small, rather unique scales, and, you guessed it, they are similar to one other fish -- the remora! Not yet a dead end for us; and even though it wasn't eating , Kobi seemed to be adjusting well. We weren't about to "pickle" the class pet just just yet to find out the answer.We could wait.
Fortuitously, we had a guest speaker that week -- Tony Pacheco from the NOAA Lab -- and the answer walked in the door with him. Always willing to volunteer his time to share his wealth of knowledge, he was a frequent visitor.
I was floored when he eyeballed our aquarium from across the room and said (grinning), "Oh, I see you got yourself a cobia!" We were impressed!
Tony did his graduate work farther south, so the cobia was no stranger to him. As usual, the the floodgates opened and he proceeded to share with us various regional names, range, reproduction, and how he used to fish for them off of Indian River Inlet (Delaware) by casting crabs around channel buoys. And that they were a wily fish, not easy to get when you needed one, and (More grins) that they were delicious to eat! (For reasons that should be apparent, I used to introduce Tony to the classes as: "Mr. Fish.")
This solved a number of problems, besides identification. Now we had a clue of what to feed Kobi.
We dived into some old references he recommended, including Goode's classic, American Fishes (1888). Here was the real scoop on the cobia:
Cobia, like bluefish, are cosmopolitan and reported from Massachusetts to Brazil and out to Bermuda, where they have been called "chubby-yew." They are also reported from warm waters in Asia and "Southeastern Hindostan." Dr. Mitchill seems to be the first to label it "crab-eater" and Linnaeus, who described the species from a South Carolina specimen, may have been told its name was "sergeant-fish" because of its stripes. It has also been called 'ling" and "snook" in the South, and in the Chesapeake, "black bonito" and "coalfish" because of its rich, dark coloration. Of course, ichthyologists prefer Rathycentron canadum to avoid any confusion in the matter.
The literature informs us that our specimen was by no means the first one found in the bay. In 1815, Dr. Mitchill dissected one caught in "New York Bay" and found it full of "spotted crabs and young flounders" which were presumably calico crabs, which sometimes swim near the surface, and winter flounder, which do not.. Goode adds that all the way up in Boston Harbor, a cobia placed in a fish car for market, quickly cleaned out the rest of the catch, reportedly sculpins and porgies. (Which is itself interesting since I can't imagine what sculpin were being used for in those cod-rich days, besides lobster bait; AND since every time I mention porgies to anyone north of Cape Cod, they correct me and say, "You mean pogies" -- what the rest of us to the south of them call menhaden.)
For a fish that lays 6-7 million eggs at a time, the cobia is relatively scarce and even though it turns up on the hook, in gill nets, pound nets and seines, its "availability seldom exceeds the demand" in the market.
To catch adult cobia, Tony had already advised us that we should look farther south in Delaware bay, and not surprisingly, the NJ record fish, an 83-pounder, was taken off Cape May. Large cobia are said to wander alone or travel in small pods and hang out with a pretty tough crowd, sometimes accompanying bluefish and sharks, for which they are occasionally mistaken while in the water. This may account for another interesting nickname, the "prodigal son." So even if you never hook a cobia, you are probably in for some excitement when fishing for one.
My Yuppie fishing friends will enjoy W. C. Prime's encounter with a cobia (From: I Go a Fishing): "...his behavior on a fly-rod is that of a wild horse...The tremendous rush was not unfamiliar, but when the fierce fellow took to the top of the water and went along lashing it with his tail, swift as a bullet, then descended, and with a short, sharp electric shock left the line to come home free, I was for an instant confounded."
Finally, Tony, as always, had advice on eating what has also been called the "lemonfish." Keep it simple: Baked and dipped in butter and lemon.
Now that we knew a bit more about the life history of our wanderer from the south, it was easy to maintain it - as long as we provided enough small crabs and shrimp. Ignoring most other food, the cobia would snatch crabs and shake them like a dog with a bone; all the while slithering, eel-like, backwards. It was quite a sight, and by September it had doubled in size, but it also became obvious that the fish was not content in its aquarium.
It would not have been sportsmanlike to eat it even if the fish were large enough, and being too small to tag and too beautiful to put in a jar of alcohol, we elected to release it.
So, before the waters cooled, practically in the shadow of Dr. Mitchill's "mountain" (Mt. "Mitchell" Park -- the highest point of land south of the Maine coast), named in his honor for gauging its height and for the first circumnavigation of Long Island) we released our prodigal son with the hopes that "Kobi" would find its way to warm enough waters to survive the winter. After all, as they say: "Gypsies don't come to stay...they come to leave."
How do ye vary your dull days and nights?
How pass your Sundays? Are ye still but joggles,
In ceaseless wash? Still sought, but gapes and bites,
And drinks and stares, diversified with boggles.