This one is a southern fish, and the 🌊 Red Sea is two different seas end to end.
The north is clear, cool by tropical standards, low in nutrients and built on hard coral wall. The south is warmer, murkier, far richer in plankton, and increasingly bordered by mangrove, seagrass and soft bottom instead of reef. Water enters from the 🌊 Gulf of Aden at the southern end and progressively loses nutrients and gains salt as it moves north up a sea with no rivers and almost no rain. By the time it reaches the Gulf of Aqaba it is some of the saltiest, clearest, hungriest water in the tropics.
So the fauna is not evenly spread. A set of species is confined to the southern half, another set thins out southward, and a diver who works only the northern coast never meets either group. This soldierfish is one of the southerners: recorded from the southern 🌊 Red Sea, 🇪🇷 Eritrea and 🇩🇯 Djibouti, and from nowhere outside this basin at all.
Look for yellow tips on the dorsal spines against the usual red and silver, in caves by day, out over the reef at night.
The genus. Myripristis Cuvier 1829 - myrios (countless or ten-thousand and pristis). ETYFish
The species. Myripristis xanthacra Randall & Guézé 1981 - yellow-tipped. ETYFish
- yellow tips to the dorsal fin spines
- red-silver body and the large eye of the family
- southern Red Sea and the gulfs at its mouth, not in the north
- up to 20 cm
