Oyster farmers find northernmost blue angelfish ever reported off the coast of Cape Cod, org says

The fish will go on to live at the New England Aquarium.

Cape Cod husband and wife oyster farmers were flipping bags on their oyster grant in Little Pleasant Bay in Orleans last week when a colorful little fish caught their eye.

When Tim Silva was working on flipping the 5,000 floating bags of oysters on Wednesday to help clear them of debris and establish the oyster shapes, he noticed a blue.

“Not a normal blue,” Silva said. “It was moving, and it was fish that was not supposed to be there.”

The fish, which would later be identified as a blue angelfish, gravitated towards Danielle Orcutt, his wife’s hands, presumably to keep warm. Since colder waters were approaching, Silva and Orcutt knew they needed to find a place where the fish could survive. So, they called Wild Care, a wildlife rescue nonprofit on the Cape.

Silva put the fish in a bucket of water, placed it on the back of his truck, and drove it to Wild Care in Eastham. Wild Care then placed the tropical saltwater fish in a bucket with heated saltwater and an aerator.

Stephanie Ellis, the executive director of Wild Care, says she has never received a tropical fish in her eight years at the nonprofit.

According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, the blue angelfish typically inhabits Bermuda and along the coast of the Americans from North Carolina to the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, a far cry from Cape Cod.

Ellis believes the fish got stuck in a storm or was brought along the Gulf Stream, following the warm water north. The fish is not listed as endangered or vulnerable by the World Conservation Union.

According to the Gulf Stream Orphan Project, the juvenile blue angelfish is the northernmost ever reported.

“Which to me is absolutely incredible,” said Ellis.

The Gulf Stream Orphan Project is a network of marine conservation organizations and citizen scientists that compile sightings of tropical and subtropical species dispersed by the Gulf Stream in the northeast Atlantic.

Wild Care contacted Mike O’Neill, the associate curator of aquatic collections at the New England Aquarium and a participant in the Gulf Stream Orphan Project.

O’Neill said that blue angelfish typically do not survive in northern latitudes once water temperatures drop in the fall and winter.

O’Neill said that every year, tropical fish are dispersed by the Gulf Stream, with many landing further north as water temperatures become tolerable. How many end up further north depends on various factors, including Gulf Stream activity, weather patterns, spawning, and populations of these fish in their native range.

Based on the volume of sightings reported so far, O’Neill says, 2024 appears to be a more abundant year for these fish to land in northern waters.

He said it is hard to say whether or not storm activity contributed to the transport of this fish further north. O’Neill thinks it is most likely the Gulf Stream that transported this blue angelfish.

O’Neill wrote in an email that it is “quite rare” for this fish to land off the coast of Cape Cod. In the past, fish were found along the northeast U.S., but most were off New Jersey and Long Island coast, with fewer reaching Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

He said that in some cases, as the water becomes colder, the aquarium can collect these fish before they perish.

The blue angelfish found off the coast of Orleans, O’Neill said, will grow up in the New England Aquarium and eventually go on exhibit.

To think that Silva can now take his 5-year-old son to the aquarium to see the fish he helped rescue, he said, “That’s pretty cool.”