Lord Howe and Norfolk islands – the fish checklist

Above left: Francis' goatfish (Upeneus francisi) described by John 'Jack' Randall and named after Malcolm Francis. Photo by Jack Randall

Above right: The masked moki or blacktip morwong (Goniistius francisi) was described by Chris Burridge and named after Malcolm Francis. Photo by Malcolm Francis

After visiting the Kermadec Islands for the first time in 1985, I became fascinated with two other subtropical island groups which lie to the west at a similar latitude: Lord Howe Island and Norfolk Island. In 1988, I took my young family on a fish-counting holiday, flying to Australia before hopping first to Lord Howe and continuing on to Norfolk. I wasn’t the first person to count coastal fish species on the two islands but my counts built substantially on what had been done before.

About the same time, I began an ongoing correspondence with the late John Randall (known to everyone as Jack), an eminent fish biologist at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii. Jack had surveyed fish species on the islands of Rapa, Pitcairn and Easter, which are at similar latitudes in the eastern Pacific, and we were fascinated in the similarities and differences across the subtropical South Pacific. My family and I made more trips in quick succession to both Norfolk and Lord Howe Islands for diving, underwater photography and fish counting, and Jack and his wife joined us at Norfolk Island and made their own trips to Lord Howe. Jack and I then published several papers together, and in 1992 Jack published a description of a new goatfish from Norfolk Island which he named Upeneus francisi. I was very honoured!

The islands are all volcanic in origin (Raoul Island in the Kermadecs is still active) but differ in size and topography: they all have coral, but while Lord Howe Island is home to the southern-most surface coral reef in the world (about 6 km long), the lagoon at Norfolk – which is home to large patches of coral - is fringed by a 1-kilometre long limestone reef, and the Kermadec Islands has no reef but hosts small colonies of coral.

I published my first “Checklist of the coastal fishes of Lord Howe, Norfolk and Kermadec Islands” in 1993. It included 433 fish species from Lord Howe, and numbers declined as distance from the Australian mainland increased and the amount of coral decreased: Norfolk had 235 species and there were 145 at the Kermadecs.

I have continued to maintain the checklist as a living document, helped greatly by fellow divers, fishers and researchers who have shared their discoveries with me over the years.

In 2019, I put the checklist online as a Figshare document, so that it is easily available to anyone interested. I updated the checklist in 2022, and it is interesting to see how many more species have been added in the intervening 30 years. The latest version now lists 572 fish species at Lord Howe Island, 315 from Norfolk Island and 210 from the Kermadecs.

Among the fish found in all three island groups is the blacktip morwong, also known as the masked moki, named by Chris Burridge: Goniistius francisi.

Thanks, Jack and Chris – I still get a thrill every time I am underwater and meet ‘my’ namesake fishes.

View all my Norfolk Island observations.

View all my Lord Howe Island observations.