Tinker’s Butterflyfish: Beautiful, Hardy, and Way Beyond My Wages - Tinker’s Butterflyfish (Chaetodon tinkeri)Novice marine aquarium hobbyists—especially those making the transition from freshwater to saltwater fishkeeping—commonly experience “sticker shock” when they see the prices of many marine species offered in the trade. After all, when you’re accustomed to spending only a few dollars to a few tens of dollars for freshwater fishes, even the least expensive marine fish can seem costly by comparison. But some marine species take this price thing to a whole new level, with single specimens fetching many hundreds of dollars—you know, the kind of price that has us average mortal hobbyists thinking, “Hmm, someone must have misplaced a decimal point here.” Among these sticker-shock species is Tinker’s butterflyfish, also known as the Hawaiian butterflyfish (Chaetodon tinkeri), a Pacific butterfly that is most common around the Hawaiian Islands but whose range, according to FishBase, also includes Johnston Island and the Marshall Islands. How much and why so expensive? So what sort of price tag are we talking here? Think somewhere in the vicinity of $500 for a single small specimen. Of course, you can double that for the pairs that are sometimes offered for sale. This exorbitant price can be attributed primarily to the depth at which C. tinkeri is found—again according to FishBase, ranging from 27 to 135 meters (approximately 90 to 450 feet).
Posted on: Tue, 20 May 2014 20:42:02 +0000
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