NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Richard J. King

Felipe Poey. Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 25, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is the story of a boy who became the most famous naturalist in the history of Cuba and one of the exceptional and beautiful groups of fish that he studied throughout his life.

When Felipe Poey y Aloy was five years old, he sailed with his family from Cuba, where he was born in 1799, to France. Less than two years after they arrived, tragedy struck—his father died. His mother had to return to Cuba, and the boy was left behind, sent to live at a boarding school. At this school in France, young Felipe contracted polio, which partially paralyzed the right side of his body for the rest of his life.

When Felipe traveled back to Havana as a young man, he started to study law, in part to please his mother. His heart, however, was devoted to natural history. He loved watching and learning about insects, birds, mammals, mollusks, fossils, and—most of all—fish. Because of his limited mobility, he was unable to do his own field work in the warm waters off Cuba. He relied on others to bring him specimens to study. One source explained that he would go down to the fisherman’s docks early each morning to examine the catch. In addition to taking notes, he would sketch the fish. Since contracting polio, he had taught himself to draw with his left hand and would often lay a dead fish directly on the paper to trace it.

In 1826 Poey voyaged back to France to finish his law degree, but even as he was sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, he was thinking more about natural history than he was of the legal system. In the ship’s cargo hold were crates and boxes he had packed for law school, not filled with books and documents but rather specimens of plants, insects, and animals, including a barrel of brandy in which he’d pickled 35 fish from local waters. He also carried 85 drawings of fish he had made during his time in Cuba. While working on getting his law degree in Paris, he assisted the famous naturalist Baron Georges Cuvier on his 22-volume book about all the known fishes of the world.

Once back in Cuba, Poey practiced law for a while before giving it up to commit to the study of nature. For the rest of his life, he corresponded with naturalists across Europe and the United States about what he was studying. He continued to make illustrations of fish and other animal species, and wrote letters, studies, and books about biology and geology.

Biodiversity Heritage Library.

In 1842 he founded the museum of natural history at the University of Havana (now named the Museo de Historia Natural Felipe Poey). A professor of zoology, Poey wrote in Spanish, French, Latin, and English. This was during the exciting and contentious time when Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection was being introduced to the world, a theory that Poey enthusiastically embraced.

One of the most fascinating groups of fish that he described and illustrated was the hamlet fish, a group that would have fascinated Darwin, too. These tiny fish, about the size of the palm of your hand, live primarily among coral reefs. Poey wrote about them in his 1851 book, Memorias Sobre la Historia Natural de la Isla de Cuba, or Memoirs About the Natural History of the Island of Cuba, in which he identified seven new species of hamlet fish.

Today, biologists think there are about eighteen hamlet species. They aren’t entirely certain about that because hamlets can be hard to distinguish one species from another. All hamlet fish live in the Caribbean Sea and the tropical northwestern Atlantic. The various species often live in similar habitats, and they are all nearly the exact same size with the same oval body, spiky dorsal fin down the length of their back, and sharp little teeth. The only noticeable differences between the hamlet species are their patterns and colors. Biologists continue to wonder, even with modern DNA techniques, if, for example, the difference between the golden hamlet and the yellowbelly hamlet is merely a variation. Perhaps it’s a sub-species or a “color morph.” Researchers and divers often find hamlets with mixed colors and patterns that they had not seen before.

During the three decades of writing and publishing five thick books about fish and identifying more than 200 new species, Poey continued to try to differentiate the various hamlets. He made beautiful illustrations of them, too, even though he probably never personally observed them alive, swimming in their underwater habitat.

Nine of the current 18 recognized hamlet species (clockwise from upper left): butter hamlet (Hypoplectrus unicolor), yellowtail hamlet (H. chlorurus), Veracruz hamlet (H. castroaguirrei), jarocho hamlet (H. atlahua), indigo hamlet (H. indigo), masked hamlet (H. providencianus), shy hamlet (H. guttavarius), barred hamlet (H. puella), and in the middle, the yellowbelly hamlet (H. aberrans).
Photos from Wikimedia Commons; for identification, thank you to Ross Robertston, Smithsonian, and Cayla Ossen-Gutnick, Sea Education Association.

One thing Felipe Poey never discovered about hamlet fish was that they are among the few fish species that act as both female and male—at the same time! Hamlet fish are loners, but when reproducing, they couple-up in the hours before sunset, swimming around each other in a tight tango swirl. As “simultaneous hermaphrodites,” they take turns releasing eggs into the water while the partner fish releases sperm. Sometimes a given hamlet fish will even fertilize its own eggs. Imagine what Professor Poey would have thought of that!

For previous Animals in Sea History, visit www.seahistory.org or check out the book Ocean Bestiary: Meeting Marine Life from Abalone to Orca to Zooplankton, a revised collection of 19 years of this column!