Roll onto your back under a 🌊 Red Sea overhang and the small dark fish above you may be upside down. Triplespot chromis spend their time inside caves and under ledges, and in there they orient to the rock rather than to the surface, so a group hanging below a ceiling hangs inverted.
The name is the field mark and it is worth memorizing, because everything else about this fish is dark brown. There are three small white spots: one at the base of the soft part of the dorsal fin, one at the base of the soft anal fin, and one at the base of the tail. On a 6 cm fish in cave light they are what your eye catches first, and a dive light brings them straight out.
It is a cave and ledge species rather than an open-water one, recorded from 3 m down to 50 m and most often on steep slopes, including inside thickets of black coral. Other chromis hang in the blue above the reef and drop into it; this one has already made the opposite choice, and that alone separates it from anything else its size and color.
Allen and Randall described it in 1981, in their review of the damselfishes of the 🌊 Red Sea. Its range is essentially this sea and the water just outside it, with records from Socotra (🇾🇪 Yemen), so it is a fish you will not meet elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific.
Breeding follows the family pattern. The male clears a patch of rock, in this case usually on a cave wall or the underside of a ledge, guards the eggs the female sticks to it and fans them with his pectoral fins until they hatch.
The species. Chromis trialpha Allen & Randall 1981 - tri- (three) + alphus (white spot on skin). ETYFish
- small dark brown fish under an overhang, often swimming upside down
- three small white spots: at the base of the soft dorsal, the soft anal and the tail
- no bright color anywhere on the body
- never out in the open water column like other chromis
- up to 6 cm
