HawkfishesCirrhitidae

A longnose hawkfish sitting on a sea fan in the 🌊 Red Sea is the same species as the one sitting on a sea fan off the Galapagos, and no adult ever made that crossing.

Adult hawkfish do not travel. They have no gas bladder to hold them up, so they sit, propped on the thickened lower rays of the pectoral fins, and they climb around a coral head rather than swim between them. Their species pages have what that posture is for. What it costs is mobility: a hawkfish holds one perch on one colony, defends it, and can spend a whole life inside a few meters of reef.

The eggs are the answer. Hawkfish spawn at dusk into open water and the young drift for a long stretch in the ocean before they find a reef and settle onto it, and that one stage in the life cycle carries the family across whole oceans. The result is a group that is simultaneously the most stationary fish on the reef and one of the most widely spread, with single species running from this sea to Hawaii (🇺🇸 United States), to Polynesia, and in one case to the coast of Central America.

The two names describe different things. The English one is about the hunting, which the species pages cover. The scientific one, Cirrhitidae, is about the tufts of fine filaments on the tips of the dorsal spines that give the group its family name and whose purpose nobody has settled.

Four are listed here, and each has its own address. One holds gorgonians and black coral bushes on deeper walls, one sits on top of branching coral heads, one lives in the surge where the reef meets air, and one is small and mottled and easy to miss. Look at the top of the coral head, not into it.