The bullseye on its flank is the whole card. A large dark spot with a pale ring around it, sitting well back on the body, is one of the most repeated designs in fish, and there are two explanations that both hold.
The first is deflection: an attack aimed at the mark misses the head. The second is intimidation, because a round dark spot with a light ring is, to a small predator's visual system, an eye - and specifically an eye belonging to something bigger than itself. Fish presented with eyespots hesitate, and hesitation is all a prey animal needs.
The species name is a local one. Pharaonis was given because the fish was described from this sea, and it sits alongside gahhm, hamrur, bohar and qirmiz in the catalogue - a small set of 🌊 Red Sea names that survived into scientific Latin from the coast rather than from a European collection.
It is a solitary, deep-bodied brown fish, unlike the shoaling cardinalfish it shares the reef with, and it works low over rubble and seagrass at night for small crustaceans.
- deep-bodied brown fish with a large dark ocellus on the side, ringed pale
- dark bar through the eye
- solitary rather than in groups, low over rubble
- up to 10 cm
