A silver seabream to 60 cm (24 in) with two black bars across the head - one through the eye, one behind it - and yellow lower fins. It lives from this sea into the 🌊 Gulf of Aden and the 🌊 Persian Gulf, and it is one of the few reef-associated fish that thrives around harbors, jetties and turbid inshore water.
The jaw is the reason. Behind conical front teeth sit rows of blunt molars, and the fish crushes barnacles, mussels, urchins and crabs - the fouling community that grows on any hard surface people put in the sea. A species built to eat what grows on rock does well when we add more rock.
It changes sex on the way up, maturing as a female and switching later, so the largest fish on a jetty is an old male that spent years as something else.
It is a favorite of shore anglers throughout the region and a common food fish. Anyone fishing off a corniche in this part of the world has probably caught one, which is a decent claim to fame for a fish most divers never bother to name.
The genus.Acanthopagrus Peters 1855 - acanthus (thorn or spine) + pagrus (ancient Greek name for porgies). ETYFish
The fishing mortality in the southern Persian Gulf is well within the estimated safe harvest level (F0.1), however, the development of the fishing fleet of the United Arab Emirates in the southern Persian Gulf has raised concerns relating to the resource management implications (Grandcourt et al. 2004). Spawning aggregations off the coast of Oman are actively targeted by fishers using trawls and long-line. There may also be some localized habitat destruction of coral reefs and estuaries in parts of its range.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
Comments
Please, sign in to leave a comment
Continue with a social account — yours will be created automatically.
