It has no pattern at all. Uniform brown, from snout to tail, with nothing on it a field guide can use.
That is worth a moment, because pattern is expensive and almost every fish on the reef has one. Camouflage, warning, species recognition, mate choice - all of it needs markings, and all of it needs an eye to see the markings. An animal that spends its entire life inside rubble, in the dark, meeting other members of its species by smell, has no use for any of it. So the pattern is gone, and what remains is the cheapest possible skin.
The same logic runs through the whole burrowing branch of the family. The fins are reduced to ridges, the body is round instead of flattened, the eyes are small, and the color is plain. Everything not needed inside a rock has been given up.
It is a fifty-centimeter eel of very shallow rubble, sometimes in water barely deep enough to cover it, and it is recorded far less often than it presumably occurs.
The genus. Uropterygius Rüppell 1838 - uro (tail). ETYFish
- uniform brown with no markings whatsoever
- round in cross-section, fins reduced to ridges
- very shallow, often in the top few meters
- up to 50 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no known threats to Uropterygius concolor. Although it is fished for the aquarium trade and for sustenance this does not appear to pose a major threat.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
