Blue with a single yellow ribbon down the back, which is a striking thing to find in a cave and the reason most divers who see one remember it.
And a cave is where you find it, if at all. This fish lives under overhangs and inside crevices, comes out at night, and its depth range runs from about twenty meters down past six hundred, which puts most of the species' actual population far below where anyone will ever see it. What divers encounter in the northern 🌊 Red Sea is the shallow edge of a mostly deep animal.
It is a soapfish, so it carries grammistin in the skin, the bitter lathering toxin that makes the family inedible, and production of it ramps up sharply when the fish is stressed or handled. That is the whole of its danger: nothing is injected and nothing is aimed at you.
It hunts fish and crustaceans, alone, and it is uncommon enough here that a sighting is worth a note in the logbook.
The name honors Coenraad Jacob Temminck, the Dutch zoologist who ran the Leiden museum in the first half of the nineteenth century and whose name is attached to several dozen animals he never saw alive.
The genus. Aulacocephalus Temminck & Schlegel 1843 - aulax (furrow) + cephalus (head). ETYFish
The species. Aulacocephalus temminckii Bleeker 1855 - Honours Coenraad Jacob Temminck. ETYFish
- deep blue body with one bold yellow stripe from snout through the eye to the tail base
- stripe runs along the back rather than down the middle of the flank
- in caves and under overhangs, rarely in the open
- up to 40 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no major threats towards this species.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
