Raja Ampat Scorpionfish

[pclark2]

Hello. I just got back from Raja Ampat Indonesia and am slowly working my way through all my photos identifying the various species I saw. One area I'm having trouble are the scorpionfish. I know multiple species are found in that region, and considering each comes in various colors I am having a hard time identifying these with any level of confidence.

#9 I think is possibly a shortfin lionfish, but even that I'm far from certain on.

Thanks for any help you can give!

 

[Jake 10]

Interested to learn from others how to identify these fish. Will continue to watch this thread with curiosity.

 

[Pipehorse]

@pclark2 are you familiar with inaturalist.com? Probably the quickest way to help identify some of these Scorpionfish. You can do a search regardless of membership. But if you can't make a match by doing the search as a non-member you could join (free) and upload your photos for more help.


For example, if I open up inaturalist.com as a non-member go to the search bar in the upper left hand corner and type Scorpionfish, there will be a drop down, you have to select from the drop down for it to work. It will bring you to this page:

Scorpionfish Search

So now you have 25,442 observations and 208 species of Scorpionfishes to look for a match of your images. Click on the "species" bar, this will give you one image of each species. It will bring you to this page:

Scorpionfish Species Page

This is better but you can make the search more accurate by limiting it to a geographic region. You said the images were taken in Raja Ampat. Type Raja Ampat in the box that says location, once again it provides a drop down list, I picked the one that said Misool and got the following page:

Misool Raja Ampat

Now we have something workable, 37 observations and nine species. When clicking on species, for example the first one common lionfish, if you click on the image all observations in the database of lionfish will be presented, if you click on "7 observations" only the observations for Misool Raja Ampat will appear. Like this page:

Common Lionfish Observations Misool

Above the pictures there is other buttons, Map Grid List. Click map and it shows the exact location of each of those sightings, like this:

Map Of Common Lionfish Misool

Also you could go back and expand the search area maybe use "Indonesia" instead, or Sumatra, or Borneo, etc.,.


If you want you could join. Then follow the directions and post your pictures. If you don't know the exact species put Lionfish, or Scorpionfish, and hopefully somebody else will try and make a species level observation on your image. Despite the popularity of Raja Ampat, I am not seeing a lot observations. You can also make identifications on observations submitted by other individuals. Sometimes you never get an answer, but for most common species they usually get identified.

Also you can search for different projects, that are a small geographic area, for example I contribute a lot observations to Blue Heron Bridge Project

 

[pclark2]

@pclark2 are you familiar with inaturalist.com? Probably the quickest way to help identify some of these Scorpionfish. You can do a search regardless of membership. But if you can't make a match by doing the search as a non-member you could join (free) and upload your photos for more help.


For example, if I open up inaturalist.com as a non-member go to the search bar in the upper left hand corner and type Scorpionfish, there will be a drop down, you have to select from the drop down for it to work. It will bring you to this page:

Scorpionfish Search

So now you have 25,442 observations and 208 species of Scorpionfishes to look for a match of your images. Click on the "species" bar, this will give you one image of each species. It will bring you to this page:

Scorpionfish Species Page

This is better but you can make the search more accurate by limiting it to a geographic region. You said the images were taken in Raja Ampat. Type Raja Ampat in the box that says location, once again it provides a drop down list, I picked the one that said Misool and got the following page:

Misool Raja Ampat

Now we have something workable, 37 observations and nine species. When clicking on species, for example the first one common lionfish, if you click on the image all observations in the database of lionfish will be presented, if you click on "7 observations" only the observations for Misool Raja Ampat will appear. Like this page:

Common Lionfish Observations Misool

Above the pictures there is other buttons, Map Grid List. Click map and it shows the exact location of each of those sightings, like this:

Map Of Common Lionfish Misool

Also you could go back and expand the search area maybe use "Indonesia" instead, or Sumatra, or Borneo, etc.,.


If you want you could join. Then follow the directions and post your pictures. If you don't know the exact species put Lionfish, or Scorpionfish, and hopefully somebody else will try and make a species level observation on your image. Despite the popularity of Raja Ampat, I am not seeing a lot observations. You can also make identifications on observations submitted by other individuals. Sometimes you never get an answer, but for most common species they usually get identified.

Also you can search for different projects, that are a small geographic area, for example I contribute a lot observations to Blue Heron Bridge Project

Thank you VERY much for this! I was not familiar with inaturalist, but will explore it a lot more this evening. Seems like an interesting way of tracking sightings too which is fun.

 

[Dan]

#9 I think is possibly a shortfin lionfish, but even that I'm far from certain on.

Correct!

 

[pclark2]

Correct!

Thanks!

To update everyone, I did look into iNaturalist and wow that site is amazing. I've IDed over 300 species from my trip thus far, but amusingly the 8 scorpionfish photos were not IDed more than just being scorpionfish. I'm guessing I'm not the only one having a hard time telling the local species apart.

Observations

Observations by pclark2

www.inaturalist.org

 

[maj2]

I use the iNaturalist app on my phone all the time. Great tool!
I started using it for IDing plants, etc. on my hikes. I t is also good for insects, gardening, seashells, and obviously fish.