The same species lives at three meters and at a hundred and fifty-eight, which is a wider vertical range than almost anything else in this family.
That is a harder thing to do than it looks. Between the top and the bottom of that range the light falls by several orders of magnitude, the temperature drops, the pressure multiplies by fifteen, and the food changes from reef zooplankton to whatever drifts down a slope. A fish that occupies all of it is either extremely tolerant or is really several populations that rarely meet.
For the animal, the deep end is the safer place and the shallow end is the richer one, and species with ranges like this usually turn out to have their densest populations somewhere in the middle, with the extremes occupied by animals that lost the competition higher up.
At fifteen centimeters this is also one of the larger cardinalfish here, bronze with a pearly sheen and dark scale edges, with the usual black tail spot and a stripe through the eye that fades out behind it. Nocturnal, like the rest, and the male broods the eggs.
The genus. Pristiapogon Klunzinger 1870 - pristis (sawyer). ETYFish
The species. Pristiapogon kallopterus (Bleeker 1856) - kállos (beauty) + pterus (fin). ETYFish
- bronze to brown body with a pearly sheen and dark scale edges
- black spot on the upper tail base
- dark stripe from the snout through the eye, fading behind it
- up to 15.5 cm
Why it's threatened
This species is a component of the marine ornamental trade, but the potential impact is unknown.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
