---
title: Dotted Cardinalfish (Fowleria isostigma)
scientific_name: Fowleria isostigma
common_name: Dotted Cardinalfish
taxon: Cardinals
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-11-08T16:29:12.750Z
updated: 2026-08-18T22:40:38.912Z
tags: Dotted Cardinalfish, Fowleria isostigma, Cardinals, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/cardinals/dotted-cardinalfish
---

# Dotted Cardinalfish (*Fowleria isostigma*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Cardinals (*Apogonidae*)
- **Size:** 7 cm
- **Depth:** 1-30 m
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Nocturnal
- **Rarity:** Uncommon
- **Habitat:** Rubble, dead coral and seagrass
- **Reproduction:** Mouthbrooder
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- mottled brown with scattered dark dots
- ocellus on the gill cover, small and low
- sits in cover on the bottom
- up to 7 cm

Five species of this genus live in this sea and they are, to the eye, the same fish.

All of them are mottled brown, bottom-sitting, nocturnal, between five and nine centimeters, and all of them carry the false eye on the gill cover. Telling them apart underwater is close to impossible and telling them apart from a photograph is not much better. The characters that work are the size and exact position of the ocellus, the arrangement of speckling, and, reliably, counts of fin rays and gill rakers that require the fish in the hand.

The useful thing to do with a group like this is to know it as a group. A mottled brown bottom-sitting cardinalfish with a spot on the gill cover, in rubble or seagrass, is a Fowleria, and that identification is solid. Which of the five it is usually is not, and a catalogue that pretends otherwise is selling confidence it does not have.

This one carries small scattered dark dots and a low, small ocellus, and lives the same life as the other four: still by day, out over the bottom at night, the male carrying the eggs.

## Also known as

- **English:** Dotted Cardinalfish
- **Portuguese:** Cardeal-rajado
- **Czech:** parmovec apianský
- **Japanese:** ナハマトイシモチ, Nahamatoishimochi
- **Russian:** Пунктирнопятнистая фаулерия
- **FIJ:** tina

## Scientific synonyms

- *Apogonichthys isostigma* Jordan & Seale, 1906

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/cardinals/dotted-cardinalfish)*
*Updated: August 18, 2026*