Bony fishes

Combtooth blennyBlenniidae

Family35 species

The name is about the teeth, and the teeth are odd. A blenny carries a single row of many fine, closely set teeth across the front of each jaw, and unlike the teeth of most fish they are not anchored in the bone but attached to the flexible tissue of the lip, so the whole row gives as it is dragged. It works like a squeegee. What it is dragged over is not seaweed but the film: the low mat of algae, bacteria and trapped sediment that coats every hard surface on a reef and is the largest single food supply in the place for anything with the gear to harvest it.

Part of the family threw that away. The fangblennies grew a pair of long curved canines in the lower jaw, some of them grooved and backed by a venom gland, and gave up grazing rock entirely. They take pieces out of other fish instead, feeding on scales, skin and mucus, a diet almost nothing else in the sea attempts. The victim loses a divot and turns to find nothing there.

The mimicry inside this family runs both ways. Fangblennies copy the cleaner wrasse down to the stripes and the hovering dance, which is how they get close enough to bite the customer that came in to be cleaned. And because a fanged blenny is a fish that predators learn to leave alone, a harmless grazing blenny in this sea copies the fanged one, and does nothing with the costume except live quietly inside it.

Thirty-five species are listed here, in every shallow habitat there is, from rock that is only underwater half the time to reef at forty meters. They are also among the few fish that will not leave: a blenny in a hole withdraws a couple of centimeters, waits, and comes back out to look at you, which makes an animal the size of a finger one of the easiest photographs on the reef.

How to recognise combtooth blenny

Bottom-dwellingStocky, big-headed, sits on the reef or sand rather than swims - scorpionfishes, groupers, gobies.

perches on reef or in crevices, often motionless
prominent, blunt head with large eyes set high
elongated, somewhat stocky body
single dorsal fin extending along entire back
small size, typically under 15 cm

35 species in Combtooth blenny

Alloblennius

The smallest blennies on this page, one of them under three centimeters. They live in abandoned worm and barnacle holes barely wider than their own heads, with nothing but the face showing, and the males carry a colored throat.

Alloblennius jugularis

Antennablennius

A branched tentacle stands over each eye like a raised eyebrow, which is where the name comes from. Small barred fish of shallow rock and surge, usually in the top couple of meters.

Aden Blenny

Antennablennius adenensis

Arabian Blenny

Antennablennius hypenetes

Aspidontus

The copyists. One of them reproduces the cleaner wrasse closely enough that fish line up to be cleaned and are bitten instead. The tells are the mouth, which opens underneath the snout rather than at its tip, and the swimming - a whole-body undulation, where the wrasse rows with its pectoral fins.

False Cleanerfish

Aspidontus taeniatus

Lance Blenny

Aspidontus dussumieri

Cirripectes

Named for the fringe. A row of fine filaments crosses the nape in two groups, which is the character the genus is defined by and one of the few here that shows in an ordinary photograph.

Chestnut Blenny

Cirripectes castaneus

Filamentous Blenny

Cirripectes filamentosus

Ecsenius

The perching grazers, and the largest genus in the family. Blunt-faced fish that prop themselves on their pelvic fins and move in short hops rather than swimming, with a smooth head over the eyes - which is the quickest way to separate one from a rockskipper on the next rock. The genus also holds both ends of the family mimicry: one species wears the costume of a venomous fangblenny and does nothing with it, another gave up perching to swim in midwater among anthias.

Istiblennius

The rockskippers, and the name is literal. These live in the top few centimeters and in the splash zone above it, out of the water as often as in it, clinging to wet rock and skipping between tide pools when something comes. Every one of them carries branched tentacles over the eyes.

LCEndemic

Orangelined Rockskipper

Istiblennius rivulatus

LCEndemic

Plain Rockskipper

Istiblennius unicolor

Rippled Rockskipper

Istiblennius edentulus

Yellowtail Rockskipper

Istiblennius flaviumbrinus

Petroscirtes

The fangs without the habit. They carry the same pair of curved canines as the scale-eaters and wear the colors of the venomous fangblennies, but they feed mostly on algae, diatoms and small crustaceans, and they live in weed, seagrass and drifting debris rather than on coral - often inside an empty shell.

Arabian Fangblenny

Petroscirtes ancylodon

Highfin Fangblenny

Petroscirtes mitratus

Plagiotremus

Fangblennies that make their living off other fish. They hover in open water instead of perching, dart in for a piece of scale, skin or mucus and are gone before the victim can turn, and they sleep reversed into an empty worm tube with the head watching the entrance.