---
title: Anthias (Anthiinae)
scientific_name: Anthiinae
common_name: Anthias
rank: Subfamily
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:43:03.979Z
tags: Anthias, Anthiinae, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/anthias
---

# Anthias (*Anthiinae*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Subfamily
- **Scientific name:** Anthiinae
- **Body shape:** Elongate - Long and slender, but still fish-shaped - trumpetfishes, needlefishes, cornetfishes.
- **Species listed here:** 7

## How to recognise this group

- elongated body, small to medium size (5-20cm)
- forms dense aggregations hovering over reef slopes
- vibrant colours, often pinks, oranges, yellows
- prominent dorsal fins

The orange haze over a Red Sea drop-off is almost entirely female.

Anthias live in harems. One male holds a patch of current-swept reef and a group of females feeds above it, and he is the odd fish in every sense: bigger, magenta instead of gold, with one dorsal spine pulled out into a filament, spending the day patrolling his borders and fighting the male next door rather than eating. When he goes, the largest female in his group replaces him, color first and sex afterward, over a few weeks. The wrasse page has the mechanics of that. What matters here is the arithmetic: a cloud of several hundred anthias is not one shoal, it is a few dozen small kingdoms packed against each other with hard borders in between.

And they are groupers. Anthias sit inside Serranidae, the family of the giant fish that hangs under a coral head waiting for something to swim into its mouth. The body plan was kept and the scale was thrown away: this is a grouper the size of a finger, aimed at plankton instead of at fish, and multiplied until it colors the water.

The cloud is a reading of the current. Anthias eat what the water carries, so they mass exactly where it moves fastest, at the corner of a wall or the up-current end of a pinnacle, and every fish faces the same way. Pass a shadow over them and the whole cloud is inside the coral at once, then out again. That distance, the one they can cover before something reaches them, is the entire world of an individual anthias.

Seven species are listed for this sea. One of them is the fish in the photographs; the rest are deeper, scarcer, or at the far edge of their range, and the perchlets in the group are the opposite animal entirely, solitary bottom-sitters that almost nobody sees.


## Species (7)

- [Broadstriped Anthias (Pseudanthias taeniatus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/anthias/broadstriped-anthias)
- [Dwarf Perchlet (Plectranthias nanus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/anthias/dwarf-perchlet)
- [Lunate Anthias (Pseudanthias lunulatus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/anthias/lunate-anthias)
- [Lyretail Anthias (Pseudanthias squamipinnis)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/anthias/lyretail-anthias)
- [Orangehead Anthias (Pseudanthias heemstrai)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/anthias/orangehead-anthias)
- [Redblotched Perchlet (Plectranthias winniensis)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/anthias/redblotched-perchlet)
- [Redstripe Anthias (Pseudanthias gibbosus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/anthias/redstripe-anthias)

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/anthias)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*