Yellow Longnose Butterflyfish

The snout is a tool, and you can work out what it is for by what comes out of the hole. This fish pushes its long black tube into cracks too narrow for any other reef fish of its size and snips the tentacles off tube worms, the tube feet off sea urchins and starfish, and the tiny pincers that stud an urchin's skin. It crops the parts and leaves the animal alive to grow them back, and it also takes hydroids, small crustaceans and fish eggs on the way past.

The body is deep and bright yellow, the top of the head is a black triangle, the lower head and chest are white, and there is a black spot at the rear of the anal fin, close to the tail. That is the family's oldest trick laid out clearly: the real eye is buried in the dark head, and a false one sits at the wrong end of the fish, so a predator lines up on the tail and the fish leaves in the other direction.

In the 🌊 Red Sea it is genuinely uncommon. The regional guide flags it as rare here and illustrates it with a picture taken elsewhere. Most divers who know this fish know it from the Indian or 🌊 Pacific Ocean, and a sighting on an Egyptian reef is worth logging.

It is worth logging for another reason too. Few reef fishes have a range this wide: the 🌊 Red Sea to Hawaii (🇺🇸 United States), and then across the open Pacific to Baja 🇺🇸 California and the Galapagos, a crossing almost no Indo-Pacific reef fish manages. Whatever its larvae do, they do it for a very long time.

Adults patrol steep coral slopes and drop-offs in pairs, usually shallow but recorded down to 145 m. There is a second long-snouted Forcipiger in the Indo-Pacific with an even longer jaw and fine dark spots on the chest, but it does not reach the 🌊 Red Sea, so a yellow fish with a beak here is this one.