---
title: Midget Barracuda (Sphyraena chrysotaenia)
scientific_name: Sphyraena chrysotaenia
common_name: Midget Barracuda
taxon: Barracudas
published: 2024-11-01T13:46:57.768Z
updated: 2026-08-13T15:04:48.282Z
tags: Midget Barracuda, Sphyraena chrysotaenia, Barracudas, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/barracudas/midget-barracuda
---

# Midget Barracuda (*Sphyraena chrysotaenia*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Barracudas (*Sphyraenidae*)
- **Size:** up to 32 cm
- **Depth:** 1-50 m
- **Diet:** Piscivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Common
- **Habitat:** Open water over reef and sand, in tight schools
- **Reproduction:** Broadcast spawner, Gonochoric
- **Hazard:** Dangerous

## How to recognise it

- small slim barracuda with two yellow stripes along the silver flank
- yellow tail, lower jaw jutting past the upper
- in tight fast schools rather than hanging alone
- length up to 32 cm

A small barracuda, barely 32 cm (13 in), silver with two yellow stripes and a yellow tail, moving in tight schools rather than hanging motionless the way the big ones do. Everything about it is the same design at a tenth of the mass.

Schooling is the difference. A single small barracuda is prey; a hundred of them turning together are a problem to attack, and the school hunts as a unit, driving small fish into a ball against the surface or a wall.

It went north and stayed. This species passed through the Suez Canal and is now abundant across the eastern Mediterranean, where it supports commercial fisheries and has displaced native barracuda on some grounds - one of the Lessepsian migrants that ended up more numerous in the new sea than in the old one.

It is a food fish here and a nuisance to anglers there, and it is the reason a school of small barracuda seen off Cyprus is more likely to be a Red Sea animal than a Mediterranean one.

## Also known as

- **English:** Yellowstripe barracuda, green-and-gold barracuda
- **Hebrew:** אספירנה מליטה
- **French:** Becune obtuse
- **Spanish:** Picuda obtusa
- **Greek:** Κουτσομουρόλουτσος
- **Turkish:** turna baligi iskamroz
- **Portuguese:** Bicuda-amarela
- **MLT:** Lizz ta' lvant

## Scientific synonyms

- *Sphyraenella chrysotaenia* (Klunzinger, 1884)

## Range

Kenya, Madagascar, Mediterranean Sea - Eastern Basin, Mozambique, North Atlantic Ocean, South Africa

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/barracudas/midget-barracuda)*
*Updated: August 13, 2026*