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Parrotfish are a group that I recently learnt about for my degree, and I can't believe I hadn't heard of them before!

Parrotfish come in all shapes, sizes and colours and can be found within tropical waters, most prominently in the Indo-Pacific. Their favourite places to live are coral reefs, rocky coastlines and seagrass forests.

Quoy's parrotfish (Scarus quoyi) - François Libert

Why do I like them so much? Well, they take part in a key role within ecosystems, called bioerosion.

Have you ever been to a white, sandy beach before? That is the work of parrotfish! They are predominantly herbivores, scraping algae off of rocks and coral, with some also being able to slice through tough macroalgae (seaweeds). My personal favourites are the corallivores - parrotfish that exclusively feed on coral.

Because of their sophisticated diets, parrotfish have evolved very fancy dentition, where their teeth have rearranged over time to become beak-like (hence their name!) along with evolving strong jaw muscles and a mill-like structure (called a pharyngeal mill), which helps them grind up their food.

Tricolour parrotfish (Scarus tricolor) - François Libert

Since they scrape along coral and other rocky substances all day, they tend to ingest a lot of minerals, including calcium, which is eventually excreted. Long story short, those white sandy beaches are actually the hard work of bioerosion carried out by hundreds of thousands of parrotfish over millions of years.

Just one humphead parrotfish can produce 90kg of sand per day!

School of blue parrotfish (Scarus coeruleus) - Gérard Cachon

Without parrotfish, we wouldn't have those beautiful beaches. But more importantly, they are absoloutely key to the health and structure of tropical reefs.

Tricolour parrotfish (Scarus tricolor) - François Libert

Image credits:

François Libert - Flickr

Gérard Cachon - Flickr

Thank you to the photographers for providing such stunning images under creative commons licenses so I can write about my favourite species with beautiful pictures to accompany my work.

I thought I would branch out from only writing about invertebrates so far to talk a bit about some vertebrates for once. I had some lectures on marine ecology and I was enamoured with this group of fish, I just had to write about them. They're just so beautiful!

I may talk about their sequential hermaphroditism in a future post, since that's a whole other can of worms that I would love to write about. Maybe a pride month special?

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reblog to give the person you reblogged this from a fucking break

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and with your help it can rack up 700k notes on tumblr in 2024

no tumblr this doesnt need tags im releasing it into the wild as god intended

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condescending online man day

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Willow on her way to give you licks

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glad that im not popular enough to have an evil shadow version of my blog that exists just to make contradictions on my posts

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Since I'm reading many people disheartened at the lack of ordering a ceasefire by the ICJ, here's some info:

The ruling was BIG and far more than many expected. I, for one, certainly did not expect that the German judge ruled in favor of all of the provisional measures, nor that the Israeli judge would rule in favor of some of them. That is absolutely ground-breaking.

This ruling, whilst not final, will change the course of how the international community is going to act towards Israel, because now they are all going to be very careful not to be complicit in what potentially might be ruled as an actual genocide in the merits case (which will likely take years, but that's how it goes).

Governments and individuals have a face to lose, and the ICJ ruling is one more nail in the coffin of their complicity.

Edit, another tweet:

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(Source)

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He has a lot to say

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Oh hey,

Y'all are amazing :›

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