Two-lined Monocle Bream

Blogged by Simon on January 30, 2009 11:18am | Last updated by Simon on July 28, 2010 1:18pm | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Two-lined Monocle Bream (Scolopsis Bilineatus)Sometimes fish identification can be hard. I now own two different books on the subject and consult fishbase online, but it can still be difficult to even narrow. In this case, I can see one gill slit, big eyes and a yellow dorsal fin (cut off). I originally thought it’s a soldierfish but had to abandon this, the colors are just wrong and the body shape is still different. My next guess was the cardinalfish family, because of the big eyes but I couldn’t find a match either. There are two dark spotted lateral lines running towards the eye and a brighter line above the eye, and there didn’t seem to be any cardinalfish matching. On top of that, the colors in the photo aren’t accurate because my flash unit died on me in the water and i had nothing for the rest of the dive, so this is an available light shot.

Lucky for me there is help. JKane at the wetpixel.com critter id forum suggested it’s a Two-lined Monocle Bream. A quick look into Lieske Meyers “Coral Reef Fishes” confirms this. Yellow dorsal, big eyes, lateral lines, different shades of brown to blue. The species is also known as Twoline Spinecheek (Scolopsis bilineatus). Something learned!

Picture taken at the Cod Hole, using a 105mm macro lens, f/14 @ 1/100s, ISO 800. I readjusted the levels in Aperture and corrected the exposure, also bumped up saturation because without flash the colors look really dull. I like the way the eyes turned out yellow, despite the absence of any useable illumination. On the bright side of things, there is no backscatter to worry about without a flash unit ;)

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