Flying fish glide, not flap, on ocean runway leaps
Exocoetidae—about 64 species in seven genera—are marine ray-finned “flying fish” of order Beloniformes. They do not true-fly; they leap and glide on enlarged fins. Barbados brands itself land of the flying fish; France’s Exocet missile borrows the name for sea-skimming flight.
A typical flight covers about 50 metres, but by riding updrafts along wave fronts a fish can stretch it to 400 metres, top 70 kilometres an hour and rise 6 metres above the sea, sometimes landing on small boats. In May 2008 an NHK crew off Yakushima filmed one airborne for 45 seconds, beating the old 42-second record. Between 1900 and the 1930s engineers studied them as possible models for aircraft.
The Latin name comes from a Greek word meaning sleeping outside. Monte Bolca in Italy yields the oldest true flyingfish, from the Early Eocene, including Rhamphexocoetus, which looks halfway between a halfbeak and a flyingfish; a fossil once called an anchovy there proved to be a juvenile flyingfish. Triassic Thoracopteridae glided too, but evolved their wing-fins independently.
Japan, Vietnam and China catch them in gillnets, while Indonesia and India use dipnets. Japanese cooks dry them for dashi stock, and the roe of the Japanese flying fish becomes tobiko for sushi; in southern Peru the roe, called cau-cau, flavours local dishes. Solomon Islanders net them in mid-flight from outrigger canoes, luring them with torches on moonless nights, and Makassar fishermen in patorani boats sailed as far as Australia’s Kimberley coast chasing them.
Barbados puts the fish on its coins and tourism logo. Stocks once migrated between its reefs and the Orinoco outflow, but harbour shipping pollution and overfishing drove them away, and in 2006 a UN law-of-the-sea tribunal set the maritime boundary between Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago after a dispute over them.
Source: Flying fish
