This fish lives on the part of the reef that stops being a reef twice a day.
The flat is the shelf between the shore and the drop, ankle to waist deep, and at low tide much of it drains into a scatter of disconnected pools. Everything living there has to survive water that heats several degrees in an afternoon, oxygen that falls as the pools go still, salinity that climbs as they evaporate, and the arrival of herons and gulls that can simply walk in. Then the tide returns and the whole thing is ordinary sea again.
What lives there is a specific fauna, and this is one of them: a squat, dark, thick-finned fish that spends the day jammed under a rock and comes out at night to hunt small crustaceans across the flat. Nothing about it is built for speed, because on the flat there is nowhere to go.
It is worth a night walk with a torch at low water, which is where you will meet it, along with brittle stars, cone shells, octopus and half the animals that everyone else swims past in daylight and never sees.
Orange tips on the dorsal spines are the mark.
The genus. Plesiops Oken 1817 - ops (eye). ETYFish
The species. Plesiops mystaxus Mooi 1995 - moustache. ETYFish
- orange tips to the dorsal fin spines
- dark stout body with large rounded fins
- on the reef flat, in the top few meters, and rarely deeper
- up to 9 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
