This damselfish lives in seagrass and does not eat it. Somebody checked: a study on the reef flat of the Grand Recif of Toliara in 🇲🇬 Madagascar went through stomach contents and ran stable isotopes on the tissue, and found an omnivore living mostly on algal turf with benthic and planktonic invertebrates behind it. The grass is a house, not a meal, and moving into it puts the fish outside the competition on the reef itself.
It is easy to name if you ever get to see it. The body is white to silvery and crossed by broad black bars, one of them running straight through the eye, and the pelvic fins are black. Nothing else on a weed flat is patterned like a referee. It reaches 8 cm.
Seeing it is the problem. This is a fish of the top one to two meters, over sand and weed flats with scattered small coral heads, often close to mangroves, and nobody puts on a tank to dive in a meter and a half of water. It goes into the sightings record as rare when what it really is, is out of the way. A snorkeler working a sheltered shallow bay has better odds than any diver.
Breeding follows the family pattern: eggs glued to a cleaned patch of hard surface, guarded and fanned by the male until they hatch, with the larvae going up into open water for a few weeks afterward.
One name change to know about. It has been listed for decades as Chrysiptera annulata, and most guides still print that, but it now sits in Amblypomacentrus, a small genus of heavily banded damselfishes from silty and sheltered habitats, which is exactly where this one has always lived.
- white to silvery body crossed by broad black bars, one running through the eye
- black pelvic fins
- in a meter or two of water over weed and sand, not on the reef proper
- small and boldly banded, unlike any other damselfish in that habitat
- up to 8 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no known major threats.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
