Yellow fins on a red fish, in a place where neither color exists.
Below fifty meters the light that reaches you is blue-green and nothing else. Red went at five meters and yellow is gone by twenty, so an animal that is red with yellow fins down there is not red with yellow fins to anything looking at it: it is a uniform dark shape with slightly darker edges. Both pigments are, in effect, camouflage that costs nothing and works better the deeper you go.
The colors only exist for us, because we carry the light down with us. Put a torch on this fish at sixty meters and the whole thing switches on, which is why photographs from that depth look nothing like the dive.
This species lives mostly below the depth most divers work, on deep drop-offs and in caves down to three hundred and fifty meters, and comes out at night to feed on plankton like the rest of the soldierfish. The eye is huge even for this family, which is what you would build for hunting particles in near-darkness.
When one does turn up shallow, the yellow fins separate it from every other soldierfish here at a glance.
The genus. Myripristis Cuvier 1829 - myrios (countless or ten-thousand and pristis). ETYFish
The species. Myripristis chryseres Jordan & Evermann 1903 - chrysḗrēs (χρυσήρης). ETYFish
- bright yellow fins against a red body, unlike the red-finned soldierfish
- usually below fifty meters
- large eye even by the standards of the family
- up to 25 cm
