---
title: Red Sea Parrotfish (Scarus collana)
scientific_name: Scarus collana
common_name: Red Sea Parrotfish
taxon: Parrotfishes
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-11-15T13:49:01.563Z
updated: 2026-08-12T09:39:57.150Z
tags: Red Sea Parrotfish, Scarus collana, Parrotfishes, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/red-sea-parrotfish
---

# Red Sea Parrotfish (*Scarus collana*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Parrotfishes (*Scaridae*)
- **Size:** up to 33 cm
- **Depth:** 1-20 m
- **Diet:** Herbivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Common
- **Habitat:** Shallow inshore reef and silty rubble, around small coral heads
- **Reproduction:** Broadcast spawner, Protogynous hermaphrodite
- **Endemic:** Endemic to the Red Sea
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- beak of fused teeth, scraping visibly at rock and dead coral
- males blue-green with pink bands at the tail base, females plainer brown-red
- sleeps in a crevice inside a bag of mucus
- length up to 33 cm

A parrotfish of shallow inshore reef, to 33 cm (13 in), the males blue-green with pink bands at the tail base and the females a plainer brown-red. It lives in this sea and nowhere else, one of a set of parrotfishes that replaced their Indo-Pacific relatives here when the basin was isolated.

It eats rock. The fused beak scrapes algae and the thin living film off dead coral, taking the limestone with it, and a throat mill grinds the lot before it is digested. What comes out the other end is sand: a single parrotfish can produce a few hundred kilos of it a year, and much of the pale sand on a reef beach has been through one.

At night it does something stranger. The fish wedges into a crevice and secretes a transparent bag of mucus around itself, taking half an hour to build it, and sleeps inside. The cocoon appears to mask its scent from night hunters like moray eels, and it also blocks blood-sucking parasites - a sleeping bag that is both a blanket and a mosquito net.

Like other parrotfishes it starts as a female and the largest fish become the colorful territorial males.

## Also known as

- **English:** greenband parrotfish, Red Sea Parrotfish, Greenhead Parrotfish
- **French:** Perroquet de la Mer Rouge
- **Italian:** Pesce pappagallo testa verde
- **German:** Backenband-Papageifisch
- **Spanish:** Loro del Mar Rojo
- **Portuguese:** Peixe-papagaio-da-Eritreia
- **Czech:** ploskozubec zelenoboký
- **Russian:** Красноморский скар
- **CA:** Peix lloro del Mar Roja

## Scientific synonyms

- *Pseudoscarus ismailius* Kossmann & Räuber, 1877
- *Scarus collaris* Valenciennes, 1840
- *Scarus ghardaqensis* Bebars, 1978

## Range

Eritrea, Red Sea

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/red-sea-parrotfish)*
*Updated: August 12, 2026*