Featuring slime and suction, a kiss from a tubelip wrasse — a colorful reef fish — is no one's idea of romance. 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 formidable menu items.
Corals are marine organisms boasting thin, mucus-covered 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.