The barracuda that forms the tornado. Hundreds of fish stack into a slowly rotating column over a current-swept corner and stay there through the day, packed and almost motionless, letting the water do the work.
The school is not hunting. Barracuda hunt alone or in small groups at dawn and dusk, and a school this size is a defensive arrangement against the sharks and big jacks that patrol the same corners. It is also site-loyal: the same headlands and offshore pinnacles hold a column year after year, which is why dive guides can promise them.
Telling it from the Great Barracuda matters and is easy once you know: this species has a dark trailing edge on the tail and white tips on the lobes, and it schools; the great barracuda hangs alone under a boat and has scattered black blotches on the flank.
It reaches 170 cm (5.6 ft). Nothing about it is a threat to a diver - the famous attacks involve speared fish and shiny objects at the surface - but large individuals in some regions carry ciguatoxins, which is what the flag on this card means. Old, big barracuda from anywhere with a history of it are not a fish to eat.
The species. Sphyraena qenie Klunzinger 1870 - Arabic name for this fish. ETYFish
- silver with about twenty faint dark bars, and a dark trailing edge on the tail
- tail lobes with white tips
- lower jaw projecting, teeth visible at rest
- hundreds of fish in a slowly rotating column or tornado by day
- length up to 170 cm
Why it's threatened
Sphyraena qenie is caught by trolling in the Persian Gulf (Carpenter et al. 1997). Sphyraena qenie is also collected as bycatch in the Kuwait Shrimp fishery (Chen et al. 2013).
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
