Pondicherry Barracuda

Take the question first, because it is the only one anybody asks about a barracuda. This fish is harmless to you. It reaches 55 cm and most are around 30, and a school of them will part around a diver and re-form behind. The animal behind the family's reputation is the great barracuda at 1.7 m, and even that one is responsible only for occasional bites, usually without serious consequences and usually where a speared fish, a baited line or a flash of jewelry in cloudy water was involved.

The teeth are real, and they are worth understanding. A barracuda's jaws carry a row of large, flattened, backward-slanting fangs set in sockets, with smaller cutting teeth between them, and the lower jaw projects past the upper so the mouth closes like a trap. A big barracuda cuts prey in half; a fish this size takes small fish whole with a short, extremely fast rush out of a formation.

By day it schools. This is the barracuda of bays, seagrass beds, sand flats and the reef edge, hanging in loose, slow-moving ranks of a few dozen animals in the shallows, generally in the top 15 m although it has been recorded to 200. The big 🌊 Red Sea species behave the other way around: a wall of hundreds of chevron barracuda by day breaks up, and the largest adults hunt alone.

Identifying it takes some honesty. It is silver, green-gray above, with an indistinct yellow stripe along the side, the pelvic fins set well forward of the pectoral fin tips, and a long pointed head. The 🌊 Red Sea holds several small barracudas built to that description, and this one is routinely confused with the yellowtail and the midget barracuda; the published range of the species is itself uncertain for that reason. Photograph the tail, the fin positions and the stripe, and expect an argument.

It is common here and easy to find, which is worth something in a family whose famous member you meet once a season.