A small barracuda, barely 32 cm (13 in), silver with two yellow stripes and a yellow tail, moving in tight schools rather than hanging motionless the way the big ones do. Everything about it is the same design at a tenth of the mass.
Schooling is the difference. A single small barracuda is prey; a hundred of them turning together are a problem to attack, and the school hunts as a unit, driving small fish into a ball against the surface or a wall.
It went north and stayed. This species passed through the Suez Canal (🇪🇬 Egypt) and is now abundant across the eastern Mediterranean, where it supports commercial fisheries and has displaced native barracuda on some grounds - one of the Lessepsian migrants that ended up more numerous in the new sea than in the old one.
It is a food fish here and a nuisance to anglers there, and it is the reason a school of small barracuda seen off Cyprus is more likely to be a 🌊 Red Sea animal than a Mediterranean one.
- small slim barracuda with two yellow stripes along the silver flank
- yellow tail, lower jaw jutting past the upper
- in tight fast schools rather than hanging alone
- length up to 32 cm
