---
title: Red Sea Silverside (Hypoatherina golanii)
scientific_name: Hypoatherina golanii
common_name: Red Sea Silverside
taxon: Silverside
published: 2024-11-06T11:57:01.857Z
updated: 2026-08-22T21:12:16.194Z
tags: Red Sea Silverside, Hypoatherina golanii, Silverside, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/silverside/red-sea-silverside
---

# Red Sea Silverside (*Hypoatherina golanii*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Silverside (*Atherinidae*)
- **Size:** up to 10 cm
- **Diet:** Planktivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Uncommon
- **Habitat:** Surface water over shallow reef and in sheltered bays
- **Reproduction:** Egg layer
- **Endemic:** Endemic to the Red Sea

## How to recognise it

- smallest of the local silversides, up to 10 cm
- silver stripe along the side, translucent body
- in schools at the surface, mixed with other silversides
- found in the Red Sea and nowhere else

This fish was described in 2011 and named after the man who spent a career working out what lives here.

Daniel Golani has been cataloguing the fishes of the Red Sea and the Levant for decades, including the traffic through the Suez Canal, and a good part of the modern checklist for this sea is his. Naming a species after someone is the discipline's way of paying that back, and it is common enough that a list of the region's fish reads partly as a list of the people who sorted them out: Golani, Randall, Bogorodsky, Fricke.

It is also a reminder of how recent all this is. A ten-centimeter schooling fish, common in shallow water on one of the most dived coasts on Earth, went unrecognized as its own species until 2011, because it looks like the other silversides and nobody had taken a hard enough look. What separates the small silvery fish from each other is fin ray counts, scale counts and gill raker counts, not anything you can see on a dive.

It lives in this sea and nowhere else, in schools at the surface, usually mixed in with its relatives.

---

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