Love the beach? You can thank the bumphead parrotfish, Bolbometopon muricatum, a wide-ranging species that eats massive amounts of coral and, well, poops it out as that luxurious, toe-wriggle-worthy ...

Some animals are poorly named. The flying lemur doesn’t fly and isn’t a lemur. The mantis shrimp isn’t a mantis or a shrimp. The killdeer couldn’t. But the giant bumphead parrotfish… it’s a giant fish ...

Scientists recently got back to basics in order to discover the positive and negative effects that bumphead parrotfish exert on coral reef ecosystems. Using direct observation, animal tracking and ...

Scientists diving in the North Pacific were jarred when they heard mysterious sounds like spear guns being fired. The jolting noises turned out to be never-before-seen (or heard) head-butting bouts ...

Better to restore entire ecosystem’s balance than one of its components Consider bumphead parrotfish, so named because of a cartoonish bump on their heads. Iridescent green with a pink nose, they are ...

Trespassers on the mating grounds of male bumphead parrotfish soon learn a hard lesson. The reef-munching fish fend off competing males using aggressive headbutting — a form of behaviour that has ...

The next time you find yourself luxuriating in some exotic, Instagrammable vacation spot, thank a parrotfish. That white sand slithering between your toes? It consists mostly of their excrement. But ...

Last week I talked about huge underwater structures that are alive, known as coral. Parts of the coral are very hard because they are made out of the same stuff that makes the shells of clams and eggs ...

In the high-tech world of science, researchers sometimes need to get back to basics. UC Santa Barbara's Douglas McCauley did just that to study the impacts of the bumphead parrotfish (Bolbometopon ...

Scientists diving in the North Pacific were jarred when they heard mysterious sounds like spear guns being fired. The jolting noises turned out to be never-before-seen (or heard) head-butting bouts ...