Facts about How the Hogfish Changes Gender

The hogfish lives in and around offshore coral reefs in the Atlantic Ocean and in parts of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. It prefers to live in shallow water, often as shallow as 10 feet. It is rarely found any deeper than 100 feet. The hogfish gets its name from its piglike nose, which it uses to root around in the sea bottom in search of the urchins, crabs and mollusks that make up the bulk of its diet. This fish is known for sometimes changing from female to male.

  1. Gender Change

    • All hogfish start out in life as females, but they are protogynous hermaphrodites, meaning they can change sex. Younger females never change, but a dominant female will sometimes turn into a male, typically if the group loses the single male in charge. She will change very quickly, usually taking no more than five or six days to complete the process. This change normally does not occur in fish younger than 3 years or fewer than 14 inches long.

    Breeding

    • As soon as a hogfish has become a male he is fully capable of breeding and may father many generations of hogfish in his lifetime. The male will mate only with the females in his school, also known as a harem, which typically consists of anywhere from three to 20 females, though 12 is most common. He will release his sperm into the water at the same time that the female releases her eggs, which are then fertilized externally. The adults do not take care of their young.

    Identification

    • Hogfish have bodies that are somewhat flattened when viewed from above, with long, triangular fins on the bottom and three long, trailing fins in front of the dorsal fin. Their overall shape is oval except for their long, protruding snouts. Color can vary depending on how old the fish is and where it lives, with anything from white to reddish-brown being the norm. Adults have a darker stripe running from the dorsal fin down the top of the head to the mouth. The iris is either a deep red or a dark golden yellow.

    Diet

    • Newly hatched hogfish are larvae so tiny that they float in among the plankton drifting around them, feeding on it as they do so. After a few weeks the juveniles have grown enough to settle to the bottom, where many of them begin their lives by cleaning parasites, dead skin and other waste from the bodies of other fish. Only when these fish have developed their teeth and jaws enough to crack the shells of their prey do they move on to eating crabs and other bottom-dwellers.