The striped fish that meets the boat. It gathers in hundreds over reef, around jetties and above wrecks, and it will come to a swimmer immediately, which makes it one of the first fish most people here ever look at properly.
The interesting part happens on the bottom. A male clears a patch of rock, courts a female over it, and then guards the eggs she lays there, fanning them with his fins for the week it takes them to hatch. While he is doing it he changes color, from the pale silver and yellow of the shoal to a dark blue-gray, and he will charge fish many times his size, and divers, without any hesitation at all. A purple-tinged patch of eggs on a rock with a furious dark damselfish over it is a common sight on shallow reef here in summer.
The poison flag is not about the fish attacking anyone. It is ciguatera: this species turns up in poisoning reports, because it grazes algae and detritus off the bottom where the dinoflagellate that produces the toxin grows, and the toxin then concentrates in whatever eats it. Cooking does not remove it.
It has also gone through the Suez Canal (🇪🇬 Egypt) and established itself in the eastern Mediterranean.
The genus.Abudefduf Forsskål 1775 - def (side). ETYFish
How to recognise it
silvery white with a yellow back and five black bars down the side
small dark spot at the top of the pectoral fin base
Major impacts come from numerous industrial, infrastructure-based, and residential and tourism development activities, which together combine, synergistically in some cases, to cause the observed deterioration in most benthic habitats. Substantial sea bottom dredging for material and its deposition in shallow water to extend land or to form a basis for huge developments, directly removes large areas of shallow, productive habitat, though in some cases the most important effect is the accompanying sedimentation or changes to water flows and conditions. The large scale of the activities compared to the relatively shallow and small size of the water body is a particularly important issue. It shows that cumulative impacts and exploitation are all contributing to a general but marked decline in the Gulf’s health (Sheppard et al. 2010). Likewise, Abudefduf vaigiensis is sometimes collected for the aquarium trade and is also present in subsistence fisheries.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
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