It is a grouper you could hold on two fingers.
The family runs from this to the giant on the wall of the same reef: about ten centimeters here against two and a half meters and a quarter of a ton there, both of them serranids, both ambush predators with the same oversized mouth and the same sit-and-wait method. The difference is only what size of prey the pump at the front can move, and the design scales cleanly from a shrimp to a small shark.
So the small ones are not a different kind of animal, they are the same animal at a size that fits inside the reef instead of in front of it. This one lives in the interior: caves, cracks and the undersides of overhangs, hunting the small crustaceans that live in the same spaces.
Which is why almost nobody has photographed it. It is small, it is red, it lives where there is no light, and it retreats deeper into the rock at the first movement outside. The cards for these cave basslets are usually empty, and this is one of them.
The genus. Liopropoma Gill 1861 - leios (smooth) + propoma (preopercle). ETYFish
The species. Liopropoma mitratum Lubbock & Randall 1978 - headband. ETYFish
- tiny, around 10 cm, and unmistakably grouper-shaped in miniature
- pale pink to red with dark markings across the head
- deep inside caves and crevices, almost never in the open
- usually seen only in a torch beam
Why it's threatened
There are no known major threats.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
