Gigantic goldfish, like this one held by University of Nevada, Reno, researcher Christine Ngai, have been found in the waters of Lake Tahoe.
Here is a close-up of the brightly colored parrotfish supermale.
One of the giant goldfish found in Lake Tahoe.
Bat-fish, wearing too much make-up, poses to intimidate.
The Scorpionfish's ugly visage allows it to hide in northern seaweed beds.
You might find a California sheephead (Semicossyphus pulcher) like this one roaming the rocky reefs and kelp forests that line the shore from the Channel Islands to Monterey. Amazingly, sheephead are all born females! It is only later in life that all of the fish will go through a change that transforms them into males.
A giant ocean sunfish, or mola mola, cruises slowly through the water column. At the surface these unusual-looking fish will sometimes be mistaken for a shark because of their tall dorsal fins.
A scrawled filefish swims through the ocean waters.
The picture shows a Manta ray swimming alongside a diver.
Torpedo rays (Torpedo californica) are identifiable by their flat gray bodies and black spots. Interestingly, these animals catch their prey by stunning them with a jolt!
A ‘head-on view’ photograph of a green moray eel.
Shown above is a photograph of a Goosefish laying camouflaged on a northern rocky reef.
Bat rays (Myliobatis californica) like this one are truly graceful creatures who are normally 4 to 5 feet across but have been reported with "wingspans" of 8 feet. They live up to 24 years and are armed with a defensive barb on the end of their tail. Female bat rays grow larger, are faster, and live longer than males.
Queen angelfish is shown swimming near a reef.
The four-eye butterfly fish (Chaetodon capistratus) is one of hundreds of fish species which inhabit the reef environment of the Florida Keys. The butterfly fish mates for life and therefore you will often see two of them. If you can imagine two butterfly fish nose to nose, they look like a butterfly. It is easy to see how they got their name.
Scrawled cowfish (Lactophrys quadricornis) - a member of the boxfish family.
Wolf-eels, Anarrhichthys ocellatus, have powerful jaws for crushing bivalves.
The smooth trunk fish (Lactophrys triqueter) is usually black and white in color, but at the Flower Gardens, Texas A&M University fish biologist, Dr. Christy Pattengill-Semmens, has documented the discovery of this unusual color morph of the fish - now called the golden-phase smooth trunk fish. A specimen of the fish was collected to verify that in fact it was not a new species. It has only been reported at the Flower Garden and Stetson Banks.
The leopard toadfish (Opsanus pardus) has a large, flat head and a large mouth with fleshy projections around it. They spend most of their time under a rock or crevice and feed mostly on mollusks and crustaceans.
Lingcod, Ophiodon elongates, a rare fish found on the west coast of North America, are an important commercial and recreational fish species.
Juvenile codfish caught in a gill net.
Jackknife fish (Equetus lanceolatus) are not commonly seen in the ocean. As juveniles, they are often misidentified as spotted drum - the drum has a spot on its' nose rather than the vertical stripe on the jackknife fish.
