A big deep-red snapper to 116 cm (46 in) on a rubble slope, and one of the reef's clearest demonstrations that a fish is not one thing for life.
The young are white with three broad chocolate bands and are among the most striking small fish in the sea, which is exactly their problem: they are collected for aquariums by the thousand, sold at a few centimeters, and end up in tanks that a meter-long adult will never fit. The bands blur with age, the white goes pink, and an old fish is plain deep red with barely a trace of the pattern left.
Young fish live shallow and often shelter among the spines of sea urchins - a hard thing to look at without wanting to photograph, and the reason the juveniles are seen far more often than the adults.
Adults are deep-water fish that come up at night to hunt crustaceans and small fish across sand and rubble. They grow slowly, live long, and are heavily fished; large ones in some regions carry ciguatoxins, hence the flag.
The species.Lutjanus sebae (Cuvier 1816) - Honours Albertus Seba. ETYFish
How to recognise it
three broad red-brown bands on white in young fish, fading to plain deep red with age
large heavy body, steep forehead
juveniles sheltering among the spines of sea urchins
This commercially important species is caught using handlines, traps and trawls (Anderson and Allen 2001). It is caught primarily by handline for recreational and commercial purposes in Australia (Sumpton and Brown 2010). This species is utilized in commercial aquaculture enterprises in Southeast Asia (Imanto et al. 2006). In the commercial aquarium industry, small juvenile L. sebae are very popular and in high demand and are exported from the Philippines and Indonesia for the aquarium trade (Bray 2011). It is characterized by slow growth, long life span and large size and age at maturity indicating a low production potential and vulnerability to over-exploitation (Newman and Dunk 2002, Grandcourt et al. 2008).
Studies in the Seychelles found the mean age and size at which L. sebae was vulnerable to to handlines was considerably lower than the age and size at which sexual maturity is reached (Grandcourt et al. 2008). This species has low natural mortality rates in the order of <0.10 year -1 indicating that the production potential of this species is low and that they are highly vulnerable to over-exploitation.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
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