If you want to see this fish, go to a lit jetty after dark.
Silversides gather under artificial light in numbers that are hard to believe until you have watched it, and the reason is a chain rather than the light itself. Light draws plankton, plankton draws the silversides that eat it, and the silversides draw everything that eats them. Within an hour of dusk a boat lamp over the water assembles a small ecosystem that did not exist at sunset: a dense cloud of small silver fish in the beam and, at the dark edge of it, needlefish, squid and juvenile jacks working the border where the light stops.
That edge is the whole event. Predators hunt from the darkness into the lit zone, where their prey is both concentrated and unable to see out, and the same trick has been used deliberately by fishers for centuries with lamps and torches.
The fish itself is unremarkable to look at, a slender silver body with a fine dark-edged stripe along the side and a large eye, up to twelve centimeters. Its range is disputed: the regional guide treats it as belonging to this sea alone, while the international databases place it down the East African coast.
The genus. Hypoatherina Schultz 1948 - hypo- (under). ETYFish
- slender silver body with a fine dark-edged midlateral stripe
- large eye for its size
- shallow, in the top few meters, usually at night around light
- up to 12 cm
