A plain brown cardinalfish in a lagoon coral head, eleven centimeters (4.5 in), with almost nothing to describe - which is itself the point of this card.
Most of the individual fish on a reef belong to species like this: abundant, unremarkable, ignored by cameras, and structurally essential. Cardinalfish as a group are one of the main routes by which food gets from open water into the reef, because they feed out over sand at night and are themselves eaten by everything larger during the day. Remove them and the reef loses a conveyor belt.
Identification comes down to the tail base again: a dark saddle here rather than a round spot or a ring.
The male broods in the mouth, fasting for the week it takes. In a shallow lagoon colony you can find one on most dives if you look for the fish sitting slightly apart with its jaw full.
- plain brown-bronze body with a faint dark bar through the eye
- dark saddle on the tail base rather than a round spot
- in small groups inside branching coral in shallow water
- length up to 11 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
