This vibrant fish with mosaic of whites, browns and yellows live a serene and peaceful life in their habitat. They are distinct by the fleshy big lips and yellow and white stripes. They can be found swimming alone and in groups. Oriental sweetlips (kanduguruva) inhabit near corals and rocky reefs and stays inside these formations at day time. They forage at night. They eat crustaceans, worms and invertebrates. They also eat small fish. If you find a juvenile, you wouldn’t recognize it as an oriental sweetlips. In juveniles, lot of black blobs are found on their body. But when they grow the spots transform into long black lines.
This fish is not easy to catch. They prefer live bait. This is one of the most difficult fish to catch. In Maldives we use iron bars (dhagandu) to catch fish. We dive into a depth of around six meters to spear fish. In early days simple iron bars were used with sharpened tips. However now various spear fishing equipment are used to catch this fish.
When I was a child, my father and his friends went to catch fish using the iron bars. The ‘spear’ had a wooden handle of around two to three feet and the iron bar had a length of around three to four feet. Lack of available wetsuits forced them to find an alternative solution: to apply oil over their body to minimize the coldness under water.
They dive into the forereef area which had a gradual slope towards the drop off. Oriental sweetlips were among the most common fish that they catch along with various types of parrot fish, surgeon fish and blue sea chub. In our island Fuvahmulah there are many underwater cave-like structures: at the reef crest are trenches in the reef flat. These are the places where the oriental sweetlips forage at night. There is a favorite Maldivian myth: heron would not eat anything except oriental sweet lips. This is a very delicious fish.