A stout little fish barely 12 cm (5 in) with a rough knobbly head and eyes turned upward, lying half-buried in soft mud where nobody looks. It is a stingfish, part of the same family as the stonefish, and it is built on the same idea at a smaller scale.
It walks. The lowest ray of each pectoral fin is separate from the rest and thickened into a finger, and the fish uses the pair to creep across soft bottom - a slow, deliberate gait that keeps it in contact with the sediment and stirs up almost nothing. The same modified rays are used to feel for prey.
The dorsal spines carry venom glands. A sting is intensely painful and swells hard, and it happens the same way stonefish stings happen: to a hand pushed into silt or a foot in shallow muddy water. Hot water immersion, around 45 C, breaks down the venom and is the first thing to do.
It hunts small crustaceans and fish at night by ambush and spends the day buried. Divers see it on silty muck sites and almost nowhere else, which is why a common species is rarely photographed.
The species. Minous trachycephalus (Bleeker 1855) - trachys (rough) + cephalus (head). ETYFish
- small stout fish with a rough knobbly head and upturned eyes
- the lowest pectoral ray is free and finger-like, used to walk on the bottom
- pale to red-brown, often coated in silt, with a dark blotch on the pectoral fin
- length up to 12 cm
