It started life in the wrong genus, which happens more often than the tidy names on a card suggest.
The fish was originally described in Rhabdoblennius and later moved to Alloblennius, and moves like that are the normal condition of taxonomy rather than an embarrassment. A genus is a hypothesis about who is related to whom, built when the describer had a few preserved specimens and a hand lens. When someone later counts vertebrae properly, or looks at the head pores, or runs the DNA, the hypothesis often fails, and the species changes address.
Which is why the scientific name of an animal is not a fixed label but a statement of current opinion, and why this catalogue records the naming authority in brackets: it tells you who made the claim and when. Brackets around the author, incidentally, mean exactly this - that the species has been moved out of the genus it was first put in.
The fish is under three centimeters, pale, finely marked, with a blue throat in males and a small branched tentacle over each eye, and it lives on shallow rock like most of its relatives.
The genus. Alloblennius Smith-Vaniz & Springer 1971 - allos (different or strange) + blennius (blenny). ETYFish
The species. Alloblennius pictus (Lotan 1970) - painted or colored. ETYFish
- under three centimeters, pale with fine dark markings
- blue wash on the throat in males
- short branched tentacle above each eye
- up to 2.6 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no major threats known for this species.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
