A small pale goatfish, under 20 cm (8 in), with a yellow stripe along the flank and dark bands across the tail. It lives on open sand and mud away from the reef, which is why divers rarely see it and trawl nets are full of it.
It hunts the way the family does, probing sediment with a pair of barbels to taste for buried prey, and it works deeper and softer ground than the reef goatfishes - the two do not compete.
The species is better known in a sea it does not come from. It passed through the Suez Canal (🇪🇬 Egypt), established itself in the eastern Mediterranean by the 1950s, and is now a common commercial fish in Israeli, Lebanese and Turkish markets, where it displaced native red mullet on soft bottom. It is named for Francis Dov Por, the biologist who studied that migration and gave the phenomenon its name.
So one of the standard examples in the literature on Lessepsian migration is, here at home, an unremarkable little fish on the sand that almost nobody photographs.
- small slim goatfish, pale pink-silver with a yellow stripe along the flank
- dark bands across both lobes of the tail
- pair of short barbels, usually folded under the chin
- length up to 19 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no known major threats. Fishing is not expected to be driving global-level declines at this time.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
