You wouldn’t think a blunt head puffer is a fish that could inspire tender sentiment, but one brought tears to a few eyes at the 91st Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo.
A blunt head puffer caught by Mandy Tillman won the rodeo’s “Most Unusual” category over some more exotic-sounding runners-up: a rosy razorfish and a shortjaw lizardfish. There’s a reason it took the trophy, and for a lot of the scientists gathering data at the rodeo, it was personal.
Sean Powers, director of the University of South Alabama’s Stokes School of Marine and Environmental Sciences, explained it at the awards ceremony held Monday night by the Mobile Jaycees, who organize the rodeo. He began by reminding everyone that his predecessor, Bob Shipp, had been behind the creation of the “Most Unusual” category.
That took place back in 1984, as Shipp began a long, distinguished tenure as a rodeo judge and scientific liaison. Rodeo anglers had always caught their share of oddball sea creatures; Shipp wanted to capitalize on the interesting data they represented, and use them to bring more public awareness of the diversity of life in the Gulf.
That first year, Shipp reported that “some really neat stuff” had been registered, including exotically named critters such as a unicorn file fish, a bearded cusk-eel and a soap fish.
The category took off. By 1988, a Press-Register report said that it had “proved to be the most popular category at the weigh station” and that people would gather around to see the entries. “Fishermen love to stump us,” Shipp said. “And they have. We’ve had some real oddball fish brought in that took a long time to identify. We spent a lot of time with our noses in books.”
Shipp said that fishermen were usually eager to explain where and how they caught their unusual fish. “Now when it comes to a hole where they find a lot of big red snapper, I’ve learned not to ask,” he said.
Shipp, known to rodeo aficionados as “Dr. Bob,” literally wrote the book on what was out there: His “Guide to Fishes of the Gulf of Mexico” remains a standard reference. He served as a rodeo judge for decades and spent 40 years at USA, retiring in 2013 as chair of the Department of Marine Sciences, which he’d helped found. He made his last appearance at the rodeo in 2023 and died in January at 81.
When Powers was called up to reveal the winners of the Most Unusual category at this year’s rodeo, he brought up one of the earliest accomplishments in Shipp’s scientific career.
“This prize was started by Dr Bob Shipp, my predecessor, the longtime judge of the Deep Sea fishing rodeo,” Powers said. “And he got to see more and more unusual fish being turned in by anglers and he wanted to recognize them and also encourage them to bring them in so we can look at them.”
“Dr. Shipp described one new species in his whole career,” he said. “In 1969, he described the blunt head puffer fish. He always lamented that he never had a blunt head puffer fish turned in to the rodeo. He passed this year. We had a blunt head puffer fish turned in.”
Speaking afterward, Powers said that was an even longer shot that it might have seemed.
“Both a smooth puffer and this one, a blunt head puffer, are both kind of deeper water puffers,” he said. “Fishermen catch it purely by accident. Puffers make a living scraping things off structures and off the bottom, so they rarely bite a bait on a hook.”
“In ‘69 when Bob did all the taxonomy and the identification of puffers, that’s what his dissertation was and that’s going way back in his career,” Powers said. “So in ‘69 he got his Ph.D. from Florida State before he showed up at South in ‘72. It’s really the only [new] species that he described and back in his day, that was the big thing, describing new species. I mean, I’ve never described a new species. So it was a big deal.”
“Bob, like I said, always lamented in this most unusual that he never saw his puffer, the blunt head puffer,” he said. “And then, you know, to get it at the rodeo right after his passing was something special and brought a tear to all the scientists.”
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