Northwest Dive Club

Saw this pic. today what do u all think??

To my untrained eye just looks like a wolf eel that is brown. Smarter, better informed people than me would probably know if that is not the case.

I know that color is not a reliable indicator of species in a ton of fish, so I would have to look closer than color to see if we have a different species.

Well this got me curious! I looked up Wolffishes in Milton Love's Resource Inventory of Marine and Estuarine Fishes of the west coast and Alaska, and learned there are THREE members of the Wolffish family that live on the west coast!
(I never knew that before).

The Bering Wolffish is found in the northern gulf of Alaska and to the Canadian arctic.
The Northern Wolffish is found in the arctic and North Atlantic (this is the one our fellow NE US and Canada drysuit divers see all the time)
And the Wolf Eel is the one we see of course, and is found from the SE Bering Sea down into California.

So, yeah, it very well could likely be a Bering Wolffish!

- Janna

Thanks so much Janna....When r u coming to Alaska to dive with us???

Meeting (and photographing) a Bering wolffish under water has always been at the top of my hit list--mantas, great whites, nah. But I fear it will never happen.

I was asked to do a stomach content analysis on one of these a long time ago. It was entirely hermit crabs, crunched up shell and all. I bet it's LOUD when they eat.....

FYI - the Bering wolffish is similar to our wolf eel, but you can easily distinguish the two by looking at their tails. The caudal fin (tail) of the wolf eel is confluent with the dorsal and anal fins (they're all merged), and it comes to a point (more like an eel). The dorsal, caudal, and anal fins of the wolffish are not confluent, and there is a distinct caudal fin (so this makes it a fish, apparently!). Bering wolffish are also proportionately shorter than wolf eels.