---
title: Blotched Jawfish (Stalix davidsheni)
scientific_name: Stalix davidsheni
common_name: Blotched Jawfish
taxon: Jawfishes
conservation_status: DD - Data Deficient
published: 2024-10-27T15:28:07.806Z
updated: 2026-08-23T10:44:39.505Z
tags: Blotched Jawfish, Stalix davidsheni, Jawfishes, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/jawfishes/blotched-jawfish
---

# Blotched Jawfish (*Stalix davidsheni*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Jawfishes (*Opistognathidae*)
- **Size:** up to 3.6 cm
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Rare
- **Habitat:** Fine sand and silt in sheltered bays
- **Reproduction:** Mouthbrooder
- **Endemic:** Endemic to the Red Sea
- **Conservation status:** DD - Data Deficient

## How to recognise it

- tiny, under 4 cm, pale with dark blotches
- hovers just above a vertical hole in fine sand
- known from only a handful of places in this sea
- found in the Red Sea and nowhere else

For years this fish was known from one bay.

It was described from Nuweiba, in the Gulf of Aqaba, and for a long time that was the entire recorded distribution of the species: a single stretch of sheltered sandy bottom, on a planet with three hundred and sixty million square kilometers of sea. Then somebody found it at Abu Dabab, several hundred kilometers south on the Egyptian coast, and the map acquired a second dot.

That is not really a statement about the fish. It is a statement about where people look. This animal is under four centimeters, it lives in a hole in fine sand in sheltered bays, and it drops out of sight when a diver approaches. The habitat it needs is unglamorous, nobody runs boats to it, and the species is small enough that a survey can pass over a colony without registering it. Almost certainly it lives in many places between the two known ones.

A good part of what looks like extreme rarity in the catalogue is this: not scarce animals, but scarce observers. It takes one person with a camera lying in the sand for an hour to move a species from one dot to two.

## Also known as

- **English:** Aqaba Jawfish, Bandfin Jawfish
- **Portuguese:** Bocão-de-Aqaba
- **Czech:** studnař rudomořský

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/jawfishes/blotched-jawfish)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*