Larry Gene Swepstan, age 9, of Stilwell Okla.,for his question:

What is a parrot fish?

This fellow is a glamor boy of the fish world and ha is often found in the rainbow wonderland of a coral reef. There, below the sparkling surface of tropical seas, the delicately tinted coral grows in fragile fronds, in perky branches and graceful foliage and all this dainty garden is made from stony rock. As we would expects the fairy garden is populated with fairy fish. Dressed in flowery colors and often trailing gauzy fins, these tropical fish flit, glide and swoop like bright butterflies,

The parrot fish is often found among these colorful creatures in the watery wonderland. He also has cousins who live in deeper waters and sometimes as far north as the Mediterranean Sea. In Roman times certain parrot fish taken from the Mediterranean was considered a table delicacy. In modern times, no one considers the meat of the parrot fish good to eat,

In order to qualify a parrot fish must have two qualities. He must be as brilliant in color as the gaudiest of parrot birds and he must have a strange set of front teeth which look rather like the beak of a parrot. These front teeth poke forward and grow closely together, forming what seams to be the upper and lower parts of a hard bill.

You might suppose that such tenth would be used for eating meats perhaps for taking bites from other fish. But this is not so. Some of his close relatives dine on clams and tough shall fi sh, but the parrot fish prefers to fend on vegetables. Ha uses his birdlike beak to tear at seaweads.

Those front teeth era amazing but the parrot fish has an even more amazing set of teeth. The bones of his throat are fitted with little spikes which act as grinders to give the food an extra chewing on the way down.

All the parrot fish belong to the order Pharyngognathi  which means throat

jaws.

One of the biggest of the clan is the blue parrot fish, His whole body is a vivid robints egg blues so brilliant that it seems to shine clear through his glassy scales. This handsome creature may be two feet long, He is plentiful in tropical waters but he may also be found around Bermudas and off Panama and Florida.

This fellow loves to feed on sea lettuce but he also likes small sea algae. He grubs around on the sea floor gobbling mouthfuls of sand. He chews this with his throat teeth in order to extract the algae and other small sea plants it contains.

Another glamorous creature    of this family is the radiant parrot fish. As his name suggests, he comes in a great variety of gorgeous colors and for a long time the experts classified the different colored fish as different kinds of fish. Now wa know that the radiant parrot fish, like the pinto pony, can come in a wide variety of colors and designs. This handsome fish grows to be nine inches long and he is found off the West Indies, in the warm waters off Florida, and all the way south to Brazil.