---
title: Hardyhead silverside (Atherinomorus forskalii)
scientific_name: Atherinomorus forskalii
common_name: Hardyhead silverside
taxon: Silverside
published: 2024-10-26T22:37:53.993Z
updated: 2026-08-22T16:15:46.986Z
tags: Hardyhead silverside, Atherinomorus forskalii, Silverside, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/silverside/hardyhead-silverside
---

# Hardyhead silverside (*Atherinomorus forskalii*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Silverside (*Atherinidae*)
- **Size:** up to 11 cm
- **Diet:** Planktivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Common
- **Habitat:** Surface water in bays, harbors and over shallow reef
- **Reproduction:** Egg layer
- **Endemic:** Endemic to the Red Sea

## How to recognise it

- narrow silver stripe along the side, thinner than in the robust silverside
- small, up to 11 cm, translucent with a silver belly
- dense schools at the surface, often around jetties and moored boats
- up to 11 cm

A fish that occurs naturally in this sea and nowhere else, and that now also lives along the coasts of Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Libya and Tunisia.

Both things are true. It evolved here, it is native to no other sea, and it went through the Suez Canal and colonized the eastern Mediterranean, where it is now abundant. The reference books have to write the contradiction out in full: Red Sea endemic, Lessepsian migrant. An endemic that emigrated.

What made it able to is what makes it unremarkable at home. It is small, it schools, it eats plankton, it spawns readily, it tolerates warm salty water and harbors and it needs no particular habitat beyond surface water with food in it. Species like that are the ones that travel: the specialists stay put, and the generalists end up on the other side of a canal running a new sea.

At home it is one of the two common silversides, in dense schools around jetties and moored boats, told from the robust silverside by a thinner silver stripe along the side and a smaller body.

It is also, as the traffic goes, one of the ones that arrived early and stayed.

## Also known as

- **English:** Red Sea hardyhead silverside
- **French:** Athérine têtue

## Scientific synonyms

- *Atherina forskalii* Rüppell, 1838
- *Pranesus pinguis forskalii* Rüppell, 1838

## Range

Aegean Sea, Egypt, Greece, Ionian Sea, Mediterranean Sea - Eastern Basin, Mediterranean Sea - Western Basin, Türkiye

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/silverside/hardyhead-silverside)*
*Updated: August 22, 2026*