---
title: Velvetfishes (Aploactinidae)
scientific_name: Aploactinidae
common_name: Velvetfishes
rank: Family
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:43:03.128Z
tags: Velvetfishes, Aploactinidae, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/velvetfishes
---

# Velvetfishes (*Aploactinidae*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Family
- **Scientific name:** Aploactinidae
- **Body shape:** Bottom-dwelling - Stocky, big-headed, sits on the reef or sand rather than swims - scorpionfishes, groupers, gobies.
- **Species listed here:** 2

## How to recognise this group

- flattened, elongated body outline
- thick, soft, velvet-like skin
- mottled, cryptic coloration
- resting motionless on seabed
- large, fan-shaped pectoral fins

This family has around fifty species worldwide, most of them in Australian waters, and two of them reach the Red Sea. That is the whole group here, both of them under ten centimeters, and between them they account for a handful of records. One was described from this sea and carries the name of Heinz Steinitz, the zoologist whose name the marine laboratory at Eilat still bears, which tells you what sort of animal this is: easier to trace through the people who found it than through sightings of it.

A velvetfish is a scorpionfish relative shrunk to the size of a matchbox and rebuilt. The spiny part of the dorsal fin starts far forward, in some species right above the eye, and rises into a crest that locks upright. The pectoral fins are broad and stiff enough to prop the animal up like a pair of hands. The mouth points upward, the eyes sit high, and there are no scales anywhere on it; the skin is what gives the family its name and its own species page here goes into it.

Everything about that outline says scorpionfish, so the reasonable question is whether it can hurt you. No venom has ever been demonstrated anywhere in the family, and the animal is the length of a thumb, so the honest answer is that nobody knows and it does not matter much. Its own food is small crustaceans and worms, taken from the surface of silt with a short lunge from a standing start.

It lives on the unglamorous bottom: silt, mud and rubble beside the reef rather than the coral itself, in the depth range every dive passes through without looking. Soft bottom is the least surveyed habitat on this coast, and this family is part of what is down there. A photograph of one with a date and a depth attached is worth something to the record, which is not true of most animals in this catalogue.


## Species (2)

- [Crested Velvetfish (Ptarmus gallus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/velvetfishes/crested-velvetfish)
- [Steinitz’ Velvetfish (Cocotropus steinitzi)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/velvetfishes/steinitz-velvetfish)

---

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