Parrotfish
You tend to hear parrotfish before you see them. They nibble loudly on the coral, chewing off the hardened algae with their ‘beak’. I developed a habit of choosing one and following it for as long as my air supply permitted. I was fascinated by them. Apparently they can change sex several times during their lives, which was very progressive 20 years ago. Their pedestrian pace meant I could normally keep up, and their scales glimmered with colours I never knew existed. I was in the lazy summer of my early 20s, lounging in cheap hostel dorms on the Honduran island of Utila while I waited for the new term of adulthood to start. A parrotfish “How was the dive?” “Good!” I replied. “Amazing… beautiful.” “Really?” She shot me a look of weary bemusement that caught me off guard. She was probably in her 50s, and was revisiting some of the haunts of her earlier travels. She'd been gazing out to sea when I came back. “Yeah. Why?” “It’s a graveyard,” she said, sighing. “Last time I was here th...