---
title: Rabbitfishes (Siganidae)
scientific_name: Siganidae
common_name: Rabbitfishes
rank: Family
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:43:02.847Z
tags: Rabbitfishes, Siganidae, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/rabbitfishes
---

# Rabbitfishes (*Siganidae*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Family
- **Scientific name:** Siganidae
- **Body shape:** Oval - Egg-shaped body, deeper than it is thick - damselfishes, surgeonfishes.
- **Species listed here:** 4

## How to recognise this group

- oval, compressed body
- small, puckered mouth
- prominent, sharp spines on dorsal, anal, and pelvic fins
- often seen grazing on algae

The better name for them is the other one. A rabbitfish is a spinefoot, and the foot is where the oddity sits: the pelvic fin carries a spine along both edges with the soft rays webbed between them, an arrangement no other fish has. Add thirteen more spines along the back and seven under the tail, every one of them grooved and glandular, and you have an animal that is difficult to pick up and worse to swallow.

That is the whole design, and it follows from how they live. A rabbitfish spends the entire day out in the open with its head down in the weed, which is the most exposed way of making a living on a reef. It cannot hide while it works, so it has become an object not worth attacking: small terminal mouth, high-set eyes, spines folded flat while it swims and up the instant it is cornered, and a body that turns blotchy and mottled within seconds when it is frightened or when it wedges into a hole for the night.

What they eat is what matters to the reef. Parrotfish and surgeonfish work the low turf; rabbitfish, along with a few of the unicornfishes, are browsers, and they take the material the turf grazers leave alone: fleshy macroalgae, leathery brown weed with chemical defenses in it, seagrass leaves. That is exactly the growth that takes over when a reef is in trouble, and browsers are the only fish that can eat a reef back out of it.

Four species are listed here, splitting into two habits, pairs that work a patch of reef and fast schools that sweep across open ground. Two of them went north through the Suez Canal and are now among the main grazers of the eastern Mediterranean, where a plain herbivore from this sea has cropped standing algal forests down to rock.


## Species (4)

- [Forktail Rabbitfish (Siganus argenteus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/rabbitfishes/forktail-rabbitfish)
- [Rivulated Rabbitfish (Siganus rivulatus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/rabbitfishes/rivulated-rabbitfish)
- [Squaretail Rabbitfish (Siganus luridus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/rabbitfishes/squretail-rabbitfish)
- [Stellate Rabbitfish (Siganus stellatus laqueus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/rabbitfishes/stellate-rabbitfish)

---

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