Cowfish Diet
These fish live between three and fifty meters deep.
Cowfish diet. The scrawled cowfish likes to eat small invertebrates such as crabs and tunicates. Cowfish are interesting looking fish due to their box like body shape. The honeycomb cowfish is considered to be a valuable food fish.
Feeding occurs during the day. Their diet is varied and consists of large pieces of fleshy foods such as krill raw table shrimp squid clams and mussels. The cowfish also known as the long horned cowfish or longhorn cowfish is a type of boxfish that is thought to resemble a cow due to the horns that protrude from the front of its head.
Being omnivores longhorn cowfish will eat a variety of meat and vegetable based foods. Sometimes they also supplement their diet with some kind of herbivorous diet that contains seaweed. Their diet consists of small marine invertebrates including shrimp sponges algae and tunicates.
It is marketed fresh and is prized in the caribbean where it is abundant. It also will feed on some species of marine vegetation. They can be separated from the similar looking shaw s cowfish by the more upright spines above the eyes.
In their natural habitat this would consist of polychaete worms mollusks small crustaceans small fish benthic algae and various microorganisms. The cowfish 1 peice. The longhorn cowfish is able to feed on benthic invertebrates by blowing jets of water into the sandy substrate.
Importance to humans edit. Toggle caption a female ornate cowfish at a depth of 4m turton jetty yorke peninsula south australia 16 april 2012. What do longhorn cowfish eat.
The thornback cowfish grows to approximately twenty centimeters. There are two kinds of cowfish the scrawled cowfish acanthostracion quadricornis as pictured above and the longhorn cowfish lactoria cornuta both types of cowfish have horns above their eyes but the longhorn cowfish has longer horns as the name suggest. Longhorn cowfish are omnivorous fish feeding upon benthic algae various microorganisms and foraminiferans that it strains from sediments sponges polychaete worms from sand flats mollusks small crustaceans and small fishes.
In the aquarium a diet of chopped meaty foods and marine algae is recommended. Cowfish nibble on tube worms and if they settle in they will live a long time dining on veggie matter and meaty foods. Being slow eaters other fish should not outcompete them for food like large wrasses.
