The Grunt Sculpin

The Grunt Sculpin

The Grunt Sculpin is an awkward looking little fish. It has a very large bulbous head which can be up to 60% of its standard body length (Mecklenburg 2003), and a long tapered snout. There is nothing that really separates its head from its body except the gills. It is named after the high pitch grunting sound it makes when removed from the water or when disturbed.

Common names include Grunt Sculpin and Grunt-Fish. The scientific name is Rhampocottus richardsonii. Ramphos means "a bill like snout", and Cottus means "a fish without identification" (Froese, 2014). The word richardsonii is in honor of the British explorer John Richardson (1787-1865) who discovered this fish (Love, 2011). The taxonomy of this fish is Kingdom - Animalia, Phylum - Chordata, Class - Actinoptergii, Order - Scorpaenformes, Family - Rhamphocottidea, Genus - Rhampocottus, and Species - richardsonii (Myers, Espinosa, Parr, Jones, Hammond, & Dewey, 2014). R. richardsonii is the only species of its family, Rhamphocottidea.

They have a white to cream to tan base color and they have mottling of tan to orange to dark brown that is outlined in black. On the very end of its tale it has a bright orange bar. They also have short flap like cirri on the upper lip. All their fins are spiny and bright orange to red in color. (Frerer, 2014). They have a deep body and appear hunch backed. Their size is about two to three inches with a maximum size of about 4 inches.

They do not have that many defenses. To avoid predators they hide in giant barnacle shells. If there are no barnacle shells available they will use something similar like discarded empty cans, bottles, or cups, or the nooks of reefs. They are adapted to look like a live barnacle when they are in their empty barnacle shell. Their camouflage helps them blend in. When they go head first into the barnacle shell their spiny caudal fin resembles a feeding barnacle. When they go in tail first into the barnacle shell their long pointy snout sticks out, resembling a barnacle with its shell closed. (Jameson-Gould, 2012). They rarely swim and are not good swimmers. Rather they move about by crawling, hopping, or jumping on their spiny fingerlike pectoral fins along the bottom. Their lower pectoral fin rays are long, thick, and free of a membrane attaching them together, for this purpose. Instead of scales they have plates that have multiple small spines on them which protrude