The roughtongue bass, Protonogrammus martinicensis, is one of the nicest rare reef fish that can be found in American waters. With a distribution spanning most of the Caribbean including the Gulf of Mexico, the roughtongue bass is actually one of the most common fish found at a depth between 200 to 400 feet at some reef ledge sites. We hardly never see Protonogrammus martinicensis in the aquarium trade, global or otherwise, but as usual we can count on LiveAquaria’s Diver’s Den to go where the typical fish store won’t.
The trio of small roughtongue basslets that just popped up on the Diver’s Den Tuesday afternoon costs only $1299, a bargain when you compare it to the Japanese counterpart, Tosanoides anthias which costs well over two or three thousand dollars a piece! Prospective shoppers of roughtongue bass could not expect to do any better than a couple hundred bucks for each juvenile Protonogrammus martinicensis. These juvenile roughtongue bass will be very adaptable to aquarium life, eventually come into their own and will probably live much longer than a similar tropical species of anthias.
