A silver-gray emperor to 52 cm (20 in) whose one reliable mark is a red patch on the rear edge of the gill cover, with red-orange around the eye. The emperors are otherwise a family of near-identical silver fish, and this is the one detail that settles it in the water.
It feeds at night on sand and seagrass, crushing molluscs, crabs and urchins with rows of molars at the back of the jaw and blowing craters in the sediment to reach them. By day it hangs in loose groups over rubble, doing nothing much.
It matures as a female and changes sex later, so the largest fish in a group is a converted male and the size structure of a population is also its sex structure - which is why heavy line fishing, which takes the big ones, skews a stock in a way that catch numbers alone do not show.
It is one of the most commonly landed food fishes across the region, and juveniles use shallow seagrass as a nursery - the same seagrass that gets dredged for marinas.
How to recognise it
silver-gray body with a bright red patch on the edge of the gill cover
red-orange around the eye and at the base of the pectoral fin
steep forehead, thick lips, snout often buried in sand
Lethrinus lentjan is an important commercial species in the Persian Gulf (Sivasubramaniam and Ibrahim 1982, Al-Khayat and Al-Ansi 2007). Lethrinus lentjan is also collected as bycatch in shrimp trawl fisheries in the Persian Gulf (Paighambari and Daliri 2012) and in Kuwait (Chen et al. 2012).
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
Comments
Please, sign in to leave a comment
Continue with a social account — yours will be created automatically.
