---
title: Red Sea Soapfish (Diploprion drachi)
scientific_name: Diploprion drachi
common_name: Red Sea Soapfish
taxon: Soapfishes
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-10-31T21:19:18.964Z
updated: 2026-08-12T08:17:44.010Z
tags: Red Sea Soapfish, Diploprion drachi, Soapfishes, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/soapfishes/red-sea-soapfish
---

# Red Sea Soapfish (*Diploprion drachi*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Soapfishes (*Grammistini*)
- **Size:** up to 14 cm
- **Depth:** 1-20 m
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Nocturnal
- **Rarity:** Uncommon
- **Habitat:** Reef and rubble, under ledges and in caves by day
- **Reproduction:** Broadcast spawner, Gonochoric
- **Hazard:** Poisonous
- **Endemic:** Endemic to the Red Sea
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- deep pale yellow body crossed by two broad dark bars, one through the eye
- long-based dorsal fin with a notch, giving a two-part outline
- often seen shadowing a larger harmless fish at close range
- length up to 14 cm

A pale yellow fish to 14 cm (5.5 in) crossed by two dark bars, one running through the eye, with a notched dorsal fin that gives it a two-part outline. It lives in caves and under ledges by day and is a Red Sea animal, replaced elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific by its relatives.

It hunts from behind a screen. The soapfish swims alongside a larger herbivore - a parrotfish, a surgeonfish, anything the reef ignores - matching its speed and staying against its flank, and uses the escort as cover to get within striking distance of small fish that would flee from a predator in the open. The technique is called shadow stalking, and it is one of the clearest cases of a fish using another animal as a hunting tool.

The family name is literal. The skin secretes grammistin, a bitter toxin that foams like soap when the fish is handled or stressed, and it is potent enough that a dying soapfish can kill everything else in a closed tank. On the reef it means almost nothing eats an adult.

By day it hangs upside down under ledges, which is where most photographs of it come from.

## Also known as

- **English:** yellowface soapfish, Red Sea Soapfish
- **Portuguese:** Peixe-sabão-de-máscara-dourada
- **Dutch:** Rode Zee-zeepvis
- **Czech:** kanic žlutoskvrnný
- **Chinese:** 德氏雙帶鱸, 德氏黃鱸
- **CA:** Peix sabó del Mar Roja

## Range

Federal Republic of Somalia, Red Sea

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