A small tuna to 1 m (3 ft), steel-blue with a broken pattern of dark bands over the back and a few dark spots low on the flank. It hunts in fast schools along reef edges and in open coastal water, and it is the tuna a diver here is most likely to see rather than read about.
The scales tell the family story. Most of the body is smooth and scaleless, but a patch of larger scales forms a collar behind the head - the corselet - and it is a hallmark of the tunas: a compromise between drag and protection for a fish built to swim at speed continuously.
Like its larger relatives it is warm-bodied, holding heat generated by the swimming muscles instead of losing it through the gills, and it cannot stop moving without suffocating. It also cannot afford to stop eating: a school works schooling anchovies and small fish through the day.
It is fished heavily throughout the 🌊 Indian Ocean and appears in local markets constantly. Ciguatera has been reported from large individuals, which is unusual in a pelagic fish and worth knowing if the catch is eaten.
Euthynnus affinis is an important commercial species of the Persian Gulf. Motlagh et al. (2010) determined that the Iranian stock of _Euthynnus affinis_was overexploited and being growth over-fished. Euthynnusaffinis is also collected as bycatch (Hosseini et al. 2012, Q. Alghawzi pers. comm. 2013).
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
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