Look this fish up in the world register of marine species and it is not there.
That happens, and it does not mean the animal is imaginary. A scientific name has to be published in a particular way to count, and the databases that track those names are compiled by people working through a literature that is scattered across two centuries and a dozen languages. Names get missed, names sit in journals nobody indexed, and names published in regional works can take decades to reach a global register. This species is recorded in the printed references for this sea and absent from the register, and the gap is a bookkeeping problem rather than a biological one.
It is a useful thing to know when using any catalogue, this one included. A database is a record of what has been entered into it, and the sea does not consult it.
The fish is a small, slender, pale cardinalfish of caves and deep crevices between about ten and thirty meters, endemic to this sea, and rarely seen because it does not come out of cover.
The genus. Cercamia Randall & Smith 1988 - cerc- (tail). ETYFish
The species. Cercamia spio Fraser, Bogorodsky, Mal & Alpermann 2021 - Honours Spio. ETYFish
- small, slender, pale pinkish cardinalfish
- deep inside caves and crevices, rarely in the open
- large eye for the head
- under 5 cm
