---
title: Stargazers (Uranoscopidae)
scientific_name: Uranoscopidae
common_name: Stargazers
rank: Family
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:57:20.009Z
tags: Stargazers, Uranoscopidae, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/stargazers
---

# Stargazers (*Uranoscopidae*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Family
- **Scientific name:** Uranoscopidae
- **Body shape:** Bottom-dwelling - Stocky, big-headed, sits on the reef or sand rather than swims - scorpionfishes, groupers, gobies.
- **Species listed here:** 1

## How to recognise this group

- mostly buried in sand or mud
- large, broad, flattened head
- eyes on top of head, pointing upwards
- large, upward-facing mouth
- cryptic sandy or mottled colouration

Everything on this fish has been moved to the top of its head.

A stargazer is built around a single direction. The eyes sit flat on the upper surface of a broad, boxy skull and look straight up. The mouth is close to vertical, opening at the sky rather than forward, and its lips are fringed to keep sand out of it. Water for breathing is drawn in through the nostrils rather than through the mouth, which is what lets a buried fish keep breathing clean water with its face in the sediment. The pectoral fins are wide and shovel-like, for digging in rather than for swimming. There is no swim bladder, because there is nothing to hold depth for. The whole animal is an instrument aimed at the thin layer of water directly above it. Lying buried with only the face showing, and the lure it grows inside its mouth, belong to the species page.

The other thing in this family is electricity. Two genera of stargazers carry an electric organ in a pouch behind each eye, and in one of them it is built out of the muscles that in every other fish move the eyeball. Electricity has been invented independently several times in fishes, by the torpedo rays, the electric eel, the elephantfishes and the electric catfish, and those organs are almost always rebuilt out of muscle somewhere in the body or the tail. Eye muscle is a starting material nothing else has used. Their discharge is weak by those standards, no hazard to a person, and is thought to work as a defense and possibly as a way of feeling for prey in the dark.

There is venom as well, in the ordinary way: two grooved spines above the pectoral fins, each with a gland behind it. Do not pick one up.

One species is listed for this sea, on sand and silt near reef, and almost nobody sees it. What people find is a face.


## Species (1)

- [Rosette-Spotted Stargazer (Uranoscopus rosette)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/stargazers/rosette-spotted-stargazer)

---

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