Having, in a defensive reflex, gulped in air in the final agonies of its death, a giant porcupine fish, over a foot and three quarters long, lies lifeless on the equally lifeless sands of Sagar Nagar Beach. For the nearly thirty years (1972-2010) of my treading these shorelines, porcupine fish were never ever seen - either as washed up decedent bodies or as discards from inshore fishing nets. But, starting from about ten years ago, circa 2010, these inedible poisonous fish have been found in increasing and moribund numbers on the Visakhapatnam shoreline, clearly bespeaking some fundamental and radical change in the ecology of the offshore waters. Whether, in some indirect way, global warming is responsible, or whether pollution of the offshore waters had killed off a keystone species, creating an empty ecological niche that these big bloated beasts have proceeded to colonize, I do not know.It could even be that inshore oceanic eutrophication by the numerous phosphate and nitrogen rich waster-water gutters that empty into the Bay of Bengal may have increased their food supply by feeding the bottom-most rung of the food chain - algal blooms. Though inedible, they are a photographer’s visual feast in the sheer beautiful ugliness of their forms, in the ravishing richness of their menacing minatory spines - a coat of thorns as it were!!! that essentially makes these beasts - that have poisonous flesh as additional protection for good measure - all but impregnable. None dare eat them in the open sea - not even the shark apparently!!!, which would explain why starting with but a small founder group their populations can explode, not one cut down by depredation.. Note how tiny the propulsive tail is. When one is that well armored and that poisonous, one does not need to hurry in getting away from predators. Sagar Nagar Beach, Visakhapatnam, February 21, 2020.
