We appreciate the review comments of Ryota Hayashi (2022). We have published around a dozen papers on symbiotic barnacles, but he is certainly more of an expert. We spent a year working as Visiting Researchers at Sesoko Marine Sciences Center in Okinawa (1984Okinawa ( -1985 and visited marine laboratories and fish museums all over the main islands of Japan and on many of its offshore islands. We found the Japanese marine scientists to be excellent, friendly, and very hospitable. Our comments are in no way intended as any insult to Ryota Hayashi or Japan.We agree the photograph we used was not of the best quality and we were not able to make any drawings. Perhaps more damning, we did not have any samples of the barnacles. Our interpretation of the attachments could rightly be questioned. However, we have further evidence of acorn barnacles on this fish. We did not use this in the original note as this was a popular online, fishing, unpublished photograph. We will, however, employ it in our defense (fig. 1). These are clearly acorn barnacles.Further, we have found similar photos of acorn barnacles on "red drum", Sciaenops ocellatus (Linnaeus, 1766) (fig. 2); a "gag grouper", Mycteroperca microlepis Goode & Bean, 1879 (figs. 3 and 4); a "hardhead catfish", Ariopsis
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