---
title: Headband Basslet (Liopropoma mitratum)
scientific_name: Liopropoma mitratum
common_name: Headband Basslet
taxon: Groupers
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-11-07T15:53:13.389Z
updated: 2026-08-21T20:10:21.293Z
tags: Headband Basslet, Liopropoma mitratum, Groupers, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/groupers/headband-basslet
---

# Headband Basslet (*Liopropoma mitratum*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Groupers (*Epinephelidae*)
- **Size:** up to 10 cm
- **Depth:** 3-46 m
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Nocturnal
- **Rarity:** Rare
- **Habitat:** Caves, crevices and the undersides of overhangs
- **Reproduction:** Egg layer
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- tiny, around 10 cm, and unmistakably grouper-shaped in miniature
- pale pink to red with dark markings across the head
- deep inside caves and crevices, almost never in the open
- usually seen only in a torch beam

It is a grouper you could hold on two fingers.

The family runs from this to the giant on the wall of the same reef: about ten centimeters here against two and a half meters and a quarter of a ton there, both of them serranids, both ambush predators with the same oversized mouth and the same sit-and-wait method. The difference is only what size of prey the pump at the front can move, and the design scales cleanly from a shrimp to a small shark.

So the small ones are not a different kind of animal, they are the same animal at a size that fits inside the reef instead of in front of it. This one lives in the interior: caves, cracks and the undersides of overhangs, hunting the small crustaceans that live in the same spaces.

Which is why almost nobody has photographed it. It is small, it is red, it lives where there is no light, and it retreats deeper into the rock at the first movement outside. The cards for these cave basslets are usually empty, and this is one of them.

## Also known as

- **English:** Pinstriped Basslet, Yellowtail reef basslet, Arabian Reef-basslet
- **Portuguese:** Perca-flecha-anã-obscura
- **Czech:** kanic vějířový
- **Japanese:** ヨコヤマハナスズキ, Yokoyamahanasuzuki
- **Chinese:** 僧帽長鱸
- **CA:** Perca coral·lí bronzejat

---

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