---
title: Orchid Dottyback (Pseudochromis fridmani)
scientific_name: Pseudochromis fridmani
common_name: Orchid Dottyback
taxon: Dottyback
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-07-09T22:10:21.945Z
updated: 2026-08-21T09:23:36.347Z
tags: Orchid Dottyback, Pseudochromis fridmani, Dottyback, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/dottyback/orchid-dottyback
---

# Orchid Dottyback (*Pseudochromis fridmani*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Dottyback (*Pseudochromidae*)
- **Size:** up to 7 cm
- **Depth:** 1-60 m
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Common
- **Habitat:** Caves, overhangs and steep reef, usually near the ceiling
- **Reproduction:** Egg layer
- **Endemic:** Endemic to the Red Sea
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- solid magenta-purple from snout to tail, no other pattern
- thin black line running through the eye
- fins translucent at the edges
- hovers just under overhangs and darts back into the rock
- up to 7 cm

This fish is the reason a lot of other reef fish were left alone.

It lives only in the Red Sea, it is solid magenta, it is small, and by the 1990s the aquarium trade wanted enormous numbers of it. Almost every marine fish in the trade at that point was caught wild, often with cyanide, and a species confined to one sea has nowhere to absorb that. Instead it became one of the first marine ornamental fish bred commercially in captivity, and the captive-bred ones took over the market.

That mattered beyond this species. It proved the economics worked, and the same hatcheries went on to breed clownfish, other dottybacks and gobies by the hundred thousand. A fish from a cave in the Red Sea is a large part of why a reef aquarium today is not simply a hole cut in a reef somewhere.

Underwater it is easy and hard at once: the color is unmistakable and nothing else here is that purple, but it will not leave its overhang. It hovers upside down under the ceiling, watches you, and is back inside the rock before the camera focuses.

The name honors David Fridman, who worked on the fish at Eilat.

## Also known as

- **English:** orchid dottyback
- **Hebrew:** צבעון פרידמן
- **French:** Pseudochromis de Mer Rouge, Pseudochromis de Fridman
- **German:** Fridmans Zwergbarsch, König Salomonfisch
- **Spanish:** Perca enana del mar rojo
- **Portuguese:** Pseudodonzela-do-Mar-Vermelho
- **Dutch:** Koning Salomo-dwergbaars
- **Czech:** sapínovec Fridmanův
- **ET:** Fridmani tilluahven, Friidmani tilluahven
- **FI:** Lilakeijuahven

## Range

Red Sea

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/dottyback/orchid-dottyback)*
*Updated: August 21, 2026*