A sweetlips with a small range: this fish lives in the 🌊 Red Sea and around Socotra (🇾🇪 Yemen), and essentially nowhere else. For a long time it was filed as a regional form of the widespread Diagramma pictum, and some authors still treat it that way.
Sweetlips are named for the lips, which are thick, fleshy and rubbery, with a surprisingly small mouth behind them. They hunt after dark on the sand and rubble beside the reef, taking small fish, worms and crustaceans, and spend the day near a ledge doing very little.
The young are the ones worth finding. Like other sweetlips they start with a bold pattern of brown stripes and blotches, and they swim with an exaggerated fluttering wobble that reads as anything but a fish - a scrap of drifting rag rather than a target. As they grow, the pattern breaks up into the fine dark spots the adult carries, densest on the head and along the back.
The name is Cuvier's, from 1830, and punctatum simply means spotted.
The species. Diagramma punctatum Cuvier 1830 - spotted. ETYFish
- gray-brown body, paler below, with small dark spots on the head and back
- thick fleshy lips and a small mouth
- steep forehead profile
- subadults striped and blotched, the pattern breaking into spots as they grow
- up to 35 cm
