Eight centimeters (3 in) of striped silver fish in a tight group over a coral head, with two black spots stacked on the tail base - the mark that names it and separates it from every other striped cardinalfish here.
It belongs to this sea and the Arabian region, and it is one of the fish that fills the middle water of a shallow lagoon: hundreds of them, motionless by day, spread out at night.
Spots at the tail are a common arrangement on this family, and the usual explanation is that they draw a strike to the wrong end. A predator aiming at what it takes for a head gets a mouthful of tail and a fish going the other way.
Males brood in the mouth for about a week. In tight groups like these the sequence is easy to watch across a colony: at any time a few of the fish will have swollen jaws and be refusing to feed while the rest are hunting.
The species.Cheilodipterus novemstriatus (Rüppell 1838) - novem (nine) + striatus (grooved or furrowed). ETYFish
How to recognise it
silver body with several dark stripes and two black spots on the tail base
one spot above the other, which is the field mark
in tight groups over branching coral
length up to 8 cm
Why it's threatened
Residential & commercial development
Housing & urban areas · Commercial & industrial areas · Tourism & recreation areas
Human intrusions & disturbance
Work & other activities
Other
Other threat
In the Persian Gulf, substantial sea bottom dredging, resulting in changes of water flow and sedimentation rates, for industrial, infrastructure-based, and residential and tourism development along the coast have caused deterioration in most benthic habitats (Sheppard et al. 2010). It is not known whether or not Cheilodipterusnovemstriatus is directly affected by this coastal development, but due to the large-scale of coastal development throughout the Persian Gulf and given C.novemstriatus's habitat preferences, its likely C. novemstriatus is impacted negatively in some parts of the region.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
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