This fish is the reason a lot of other reef fish were left alone.
It lives only in the 🌊 Red Sea, it is solid magenta, it is small, and by the 1990s the aquarium trade wanted enormous numbers of it. Almost every marine fish in the trade at that point was caught wild, often with cyanide, and a species confined to one sea has nowhere to absorb that. Instead it became one of the first marine ornamental fish bred commercially in captivity, and the captive-bred ones took over the market.
That mattered beyond this species. It proved the economics worked, and the same hatcheries went on to breed clownfish, other dottybacks and gobies by the hundred thousand. A fish from a cave in the 🌊 Red Sea is a large part of why a reef aquarium today is not simply a hole cut in a reef somewhere.
Underwater it is easy and hard at once: the color is unmistakable and nothing else here is that purple, but it will not leave its overhang. It hovers upside down under the ceiling, watches you, and is back inside the rock before the camera focuses.
The name honors David Fridman, who worked on the fish at Eilat.
The genus. Pseudochromis Rüppell 1835 - pseudo- (false). ETYFish
- solid magenta-purple from snout to tail, no other pattern
- thin black line running through the eye
- fins translucent at the edges
- hovers just under overhangs and darts back into the rock
- up to 7 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no known major threats to this species.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
