---
title: Arabian Fangblenny (Petroscirtes ancylodon)
scientific_name: Petroscirtes ancylodon
common_name: Arabian Fangblenny
taxon: Combtooth blenny
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-11-16T04:43:07.278Z
updated: 2026-08-18T07:31:33.256Z
tags: Arabian Fangblenny, Petroscirtes ancylodon, Combtooth blenny, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/combtooth-blenny/arabian-fangblenny
---

# Arabian Fangblenny (*Petroscirtes ancylodon*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Combtooth blenny (*Blenniidae*)
- **Size:** up to 11.5 cm
- **Diet:** Omnivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Uncommon
- **Habitat:** Seagrass, weedy ground and around floating objects
- **Reproduction:** Egg layer
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- slender pale body with a dark stripe from the snout through the eye
- tall front dorsal fin
- pair of long curved canines in the lower jaw
- in seagrass and under drifting weed rather than on coral
- up to 11.5 cm

It travels by hitchhiking. This blenny lives in seagrass and weedy shallows and spends a good part of its time around anything drifting: mats of torn algae, floating fronds, planks, plastic. Small fish that cannot swim across open water get carried across it instead, and a raft of weed moving with the current is a working vessel with food, shade and cover attached.

That is how a weak-swimming, hole-dwelling animal ends up with a range running from the northern Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, and how it turns up in places nothing walked to. It also explains why this species keeps appearing in new locations: rafting is one of the main ways coastal fish extend a range, and it has become considerably easier since the sea filled up with floating debris that does not rot.

The fangs are real and the venom is not. Like the rest of Petroscirtes it carries a pair of long lower canines with no glands behind them, borrowing the reputation of the venomous fangblennies it resembles.

On the bottom it is a seagrass animal, pale with a dark eye stripe, and it nests in whatever hollow object it can find.

## Also known as

- **English:** Arabian Fangblenny
- **Hebrew:** דלגן
- **French:** Blennie à dents de sabre d'Arabie
- **Greek:** Σπαθόδοντη σαλιάρα
- **Turkish:** horozbina
- **Czech:** slizoun arabský
- **FI:** arabianluikero

## Scientific synonyms

- *Petroskirtes ancylodon* Rüppell, 1835

## Range

Eritrea, Mediterranean Sea - Eastern Basin

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/combtooth-blenny/arabian-fangblenny)*
*Updated: August 18, 2026*