One of the privileges of working as a marine biologist in Australia is the great diversity of fishes and the extraordinary array of habitats in which they are found. My passion is the ecology of reef associated fishes and over three decades I have worked on them as, in my view, an ‘ecological detective’. This talk is about that detective work, the collaborators I have had and, in particular a talented group of research students where a combination of long-term data sets and new approaches has revealed a great deal. The tales of fishes are as follows: a damselfish on the Great Barrier Reef that is short lived and whose connectivity appears to be driven by catastrophic events such as cyclones; a long-lived fish found in temperate NSW that appears resilient to environmental perturbations, but has an inherent vulnerability – it only does well in urchin grazed barrens; and a tropical snapper that has stochastic recruitment, and ‘interviewing the recruits’ combined with biophysical modelling has been revealing. A great surprise has been how fish larvae have manoeuvred in our minds from drifting objects to small particles with mobility and surprizing powers of orientation, this in turn is changing our understanding of population connectivity. Finally, on reflection, the changing face of fish biology, where we are all fortunate that the combined talents of males and females is making a difference to resolving the Grand challenges.