Garfish

• Its bones are a striking blue-green from a build-up of biliverdin, a bile pigment — a conspicuous but harmless trait that often puts off anyone cooking it for the first time.
• It leaps and travels out of the water on its tail, and serious injuries have been documented in the Black Sea and the Caribbean from needlefish jumping towards a lit boat at night.
• Its young hatch with a short beak and only develop the upper jaw later, in several stages.
• Its bones are green — an intense green that comes as a surprise when the fish is opened. It is due to biliverdin, a bile pigment it accumulates in the skeleton and which most vertebrates excrete.
• That colour is completely harmless, but it has weighed on its commercial value for centuries because it unsettles the consumer.
• It swims just below the surface and leaps out of the water when chased; its leaps have injured fishermen, because the beak is long and sharp.
• Juveniles lack a fully formed beak: the lower jaw grows first and the upper one later, so they pass through a stage that looks very different from the adult.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (fish)

Habitat and environment

Surface coastal and open waters of the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Belone belone

Best time: Spring and summer, when it comes inshore to spawn