A deep-bodied silver fish of 35 to 70 cm (14 to 28 in) with a steep forehead, a dark blotch at the shoulder and one unmistakable mark: a gold band running between the eyes, which is what the name records in both Latin and English.
It got here the wrong way down a one-way street. Since the Suez Canal (🇪🇬 Egypt) opened, something like a hundred species have moved north through it from this sea into the Mediterranean, a flood large enough to have its own name - Lessepsian migration, after the canal's builder. Traffic in the other direction is a trickle: colder, less salty Mediterranean water and a fauna adapted to it make the southbound trip much harder. This bream is one of the few that managed it, and it is now established in the Gulf of Aqaba, which makes it an anti-Lessepsian migrant - a category with perhaps a dozen members against the hundred going the other way.
It is born male and stays that way for two or three years. Around 30 cm (12 in), a proportion of the population reverses sex and finishes life as females, the opposite of the pattern in wrasses and groupers. That single fact shapes an entire industry: this is one of the most intensively farmed marine fish in the world, and a farm without older stock has no eggs.
The teeth explain where it lives. Rows of blunt molars at the back of the jaw crush mussels, clams and urchins whole, so the fish works sand, seagrass and anything encrusted rather than open reef - and in aquaculture the same jaw makes it notorious for chewing through nets.
The species. Sparus aurata Linnaeus 1758 - gold (noun. ETYFish
- gold band running between the eyes
- dark blotch at the shoulder, above the gill cover
- deep silver body with a steep forehead
- over sand and seagrass, mainly in the north
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
