Parrot fish (Pretty sure you can't teach these to speak)

So it's time for another fish profile again, this is a fish I won't be adding to my tank this beautiful fish gets a bit too big for my tank and they also are know to eat hard corals.

Type:

Fish

Diet:

Omnivore

Average life span in the wild:

Up to 7 years

Size:

1 to 4 ft (30 to 120 cm)

Group name:

School

Did you know?

Some male parrot fish maintain harems of females. If the dominant male dies, one of the females will change gender and color and become the dominant male a process called sequential hermaphroditism.

Size relative to a tea cup:

Its diet which consists primarily of algae extracted from chunks of coral ripped from a reef. The coral is pulverized with grinding teeth in the fishes’ throats in order to get to the algae-filled polyps inside. 

The parrot fish can’t metabolise this coral so it ‘throws it overboard’ in the form of grains.  The existence of this species of fish is essential to the survival of the coral as it acts as a ‘natural cleaner’ of parasites, etc. that grow on it, so without the help of the parrot fish the coral would die. If you find yourself near one of these fish you will find them munching and making crunching sounds with every bite.

Another reason is that they need to do this constantly in order to keep their beaks clean and that they (the beaks) don’t grow too much.  We’re talking about an insatiable fish that spends the whole day eating and ‘discharging’ without a break and that’s why just one parrot fish can produce 100 kg of white sand every year!!  Thinking about this then, to those of us who adore paradisiacal beaches, it’s obviously important that there is an abundance of the parrot fish.

So next time time your laying on a white sand beach just think that sand came from a fish's bum haha only kidding only a small amount is produced this way.