Date: Sunday f 20, 2012
Green Wrass
We have seen, when speaking of the Ballan Wrass, that it is common to this whole family to be characterized by the possession of lively colours, which in each species are liable to considerable variation, and of which the intensity will be modified according to the nature of the ground they live in, or depth of water. But notwithstanding this tendency to vary, each species is found to possess a prevailing cast of colour, beyond a certain limit of which the variation does not proceed.
These colours appear to have their seat in the epidermis or skin which clothes the body, and especially covers that elongated portion of each scale which remains free and not overlapped, and which serves to keep the scales in their place.
Although the colour diffused over the body is intimately associated with their health and life, and even with their passions, so as to vary with these conditions in a very short time, and the Ballan Wrass has been seen to change decidedly under the impulse of the fear of capture, yet the prevailing bias of these tints appears to be under the dominion of chemical materials which are constituent portions of the blood, in the same manner as are the leaves of trees under similar conditions.
Thus, in the Ballan Wrass, where the colours will be red, or on different parts of the same surftice, yet gradually after death these colours will fade or change, and settle down into permanent green or red, as we believe according to the pre- dominancy of their acid or alkaline affinities.
But there are species mentioned by foreign naturalists, which in life are said to be constantly marked with a prcponderancy of living green, and as a fish similarly adorned is sometimes met with on our coast, observers have generally agreed to consider it a distinct species, with the name of the Green "Wrass, or Lahrus lineatus, the last-mentioned denomination beinsr derived from some streaks of another colour that is seen upon it when of full size.
But that the British Green Wrass is truly a separate species is far from certain, and our placing it under a separate name from the last species is rather in deference to the opinion of other writers than from our own judgment.
That the situation to which they resort has much influence in producing the colour appears from the fact that those Wrasses which are found along that range of rocks on which the Eddystone lifts its light, and which consequently are several miles from land, are uniformly of a pale green, with some shades or lines of brown, but in other particulars, and especially of form, they are not to be distinguished from the common species.
The younger fish are of the brighter green, and I am indebted for a figure of an example in this condition, of the natural size, as represented in the engraving, to William P. Cocks, Esq of Falmouth, in which harbour it was caught by angling from the rocks.
In this example the fin rays enumerated were, in the dorsal twenty firm and ten soft, anal three firm and eight soft, pectoral fourteen, ventral eight, of which three were firm, in the caudal fifteen rays.
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