Hawkfish

If you like your people nice and peaceful, chances are you’ll get along just fine with the hawkfish in your aquarium. With an easygoing nature, the hawkfish is a treat to maintain. They very clearly willing to wait for good things to happen as perched amongst the rocks, they wait for food to pass by.

Aquarium Care: Go easy on numbers and avoid a large opening in your aquarium lid. Let us explain. Restrict yourself to only one species per tank and feed them high protein foods such as shrimp and small fishes. They most common cause of death among Hawkfish is (in captivity) jumping out an aquarium with too large an opening in the lid. They lack a swim bladder so they sink when they stop swimming, and have reinforced fin rays to help prop them up when at rest.

Take a look at the topmost species of hawkfish that are popular as pets!

Cirrhitichthys: These hawkfish come from shallower waters and have a blunt head. Their dorsal fin spines have 3-5 small rays coming off of them, and they attain a maximum length of 3 inches.

Neocirrhitus: This is the familiar red hawk, and it is in a class by itself. They lack the rays on their dorsal fin spines and attain a length of about 3 inches. They are commonly found at depths of greater than 100 feet!

Paracirrhites: These are the Hawaiian hawks (although they are found through out the Indo Pacific) and they lack the dorsal fin rays and come in a variety of colors and with some species attaining a length of 12 inches!

Oxycirrhites typus: The long nosed hawk is unmistakable with its long draw out snout. They have similar care and feeding as the other hawks and grow to reach about three inches in length.

  • Habitat: Hawkfish are basically tropical, perciform marine fish of the family Cirrhitidae. Associated with the coral reefs of the western and eastern Atlantic and Indo-Pacific, the hawkfish family contains 12 genera and 32 species. They share many morphological features with the scorpionfish of the family Scorpaenidae.
  • Appearance: Hawkfish have large heads with thick, somewhat elongate bodies. Their dorsal fins are merged, with the first consisting of ten connected spines. At the tip of each spine are several trailing filaments, hence the family name Cirrhitidae, from the Latin cirrus meaning "fringe." Their tail fins are rounded and truncate and their pectoral fins are enlarged and skinless. Their scales may be cycloid or ctenoid. Most hawkfish are small, from about 7-15 centimetres in length. The largest species, the giant hawkfish (Cirrhitus rivulatus) attains a length of 60 centimetres and a weight of 4 kilograms. The vibrant colours exhibited by most hawkfish have won them popularity in the aquarium hobby, aided by the fishes' reputation for unproblematic upkeep and easy acclimation to tank life. Popularly kept species include the longnose hawkfish (Oxycirrhites typus), coloured in a red and pink crosshatch pattern, and the flame hawkfish (Neocirrhites armatus), which easily lives up to its name.

The hawkfish, interestingly have been named so because of their tendency to survey the surroundings closely, very similar to a hawk’s eye!