A 🌊 Red Sea fish and, as far as anyone has recorded, nowhere else.
Sand-divers hover in loose groups a few centimeters above open sand, slim and half transparent, angled into the current and picking small animals out of the water as it goes past. Come too close and the entire group drops and vanishes. They go in headfirst, and what is left is a flat sandy bottom with nothing on it.
They live in the sand as well as escape into it. A sand-diver sleeps buried, and its eyes sit high on the head so a buried fish can still watch what is going on above it.
The males are what to look for. In display the first spines of the dorsal fin are drawn out into long filaments, which they raise and flick at each other over the sand while the drab females carry on feeding. A male at full stretch looks like a different species.
It was described in 1966 from the Gulf of Aqaba by Eugenie Clark and Hedy von Schmidt, working the sand flats that most people swim straight over on the way to the reef.
The genus. Trichonotus Bloch & Schneider 1801 - notus (back). ETYFish
The species. Trichonotus nikii Clark & von Schmidt 1966 - Honours Niki Konstantinou. ETYFish
- long slender pale body hovering a few centimeters above open sand
- dives headfirst into the sand and disappears completely
- eyes set high on the head
- males with the first dorsal spines drawn out into long filaments
- up to 11 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
