For years this fish was known from one bay.
It was described from Nuweiba, in the Gulf of Aqaba, and for a long time that was the entire recorded distribution of the species: a single stretch of sheltered sandy bottom, on a planet with three hundred and sixty million square kilometers of sea. Then somebody found it at Abu Dabab, several hundred kilometers south on the Egyptian coast, and the map acquired a second dot.
That is not really a statement about the fish. It is a statement about where people look. This animal is under four centimeters, it lives in a hole in fine sand in sheltered bays, and it drops out of sight when a diver approaches. The habitat it needs is unglamorous, nobody runs boats to it, and the species is small enough that a survey can pass over a colony without registering it. Almost certainly it lives in many places between the two known ones.
A good part of what looks like extreme rarity in the catalogue is this: not scarce animals, but scarce observers. It takes one person with a camera lying in the sand for an hour to move a species from one dot to two.
The species. Stalix davidsheni Klausewitz 1985 - Honours David Shen. ETYFish
- tiny, under 4 cm, pale with dark blotches
- hovers just above a vertical hole in fine sand
- known from only a handful of places in this sea
- found in the Red Sea and nowhere else
Why it's threatened
Threats to this species are unknown but it is not likely currently impacted by any major threats.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
