Loulu the Scrawled Filefish is a bizarre looking sea creature! It can grow to almost 3 feet long but it is only two inches wide. Its huge tail fin can be a third of its body length and it has a tiny round mouth. Loulu can change colors quickly from green with blue stripes to solid grey.
Loulu the Scrawled Filefish is a bizarre looking sea creature! It can grow to almost 3 feet long but it is only two inches wide. Its huge tail fin can be a third of its body length and it has a tiny round mouth. Loulu can change colors quickly from green with blue stripes to solid grey.
What is really strange about this fish is what it eats. While scuba diving, we often find them at the mouth of dark underwater caves where they feed on zoanthids that are highly poisonous. These fish have also been observed way out in the middle of the sea feeding on jellyfish. They seem to feed on small animals that no other predator can eat.
Loulu is a very mysterious fish because they sometimes show up in schools of ten or more then they may disappear for years at a time. Loulu means “to hook” and the name is also used for a species of palm tree that have leaves that look like the tail of the Scrawled Filefish. In old Hawaiian times, this fish was used in sorcery and its flesh can sometimes be poisonous more than likely due to a dangerous toxin in the zoanthids it eats.
The first time I saw this fish was on a scuba dive I did at Makua (Tunnels Reef) in Kaua‘i and there were ten of them feeding on a 40 foot dark ledge. They looked huge but when I got close enough they became frightened and they turned sideways and swam through a crack in the reef wall that was only about three inches wide. I was just amazed at how a 30 inch long fish could disappear right into the reef! After this one dive I did over 300 additional dives at Makua over a 20 year period and I have only seen two of these fish at one time and never again a large school of them.
Where does loulu go to? I would love to have a “critter cam” mounted on this fish to track its movements. I have seen over 50 of these fish now but only one baby and that was yesterday. In old Hawai‘i the kahunas tracked fish like loulu and when they showed up in large numbers this often meant a disaster was ready to happen on land and the fish may have been used to evoke evil spirits.
One could spend a lifetime just tracking fish like loulu because very little is known about them and they disappear into the deep blue sea that has yet to be explored by humans!
You can see loulu in action in my Hawaiian underwater educational series on my YouTube channel at Underwater2web. All of my movies are made for kids to watch and are good education for kids in school science class.
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Terry Lilley is a marine biologist living in Hanalei Kaua‘i and co-founder of Reef Guardians Hawai‘i, a nonprofit on a mission to provide education and resources to protect the coral reef. To donate to Reef Guardians Hawaii go to www.reefguardianshawaii.org.
