Dotted Bream

The family this fish belongs to is mostly caught, not seen. The threadfin breams proper, the genus Nemipterus, live over open sand and mud away from the reef, come up by the ton in Indo-Pacific trawls, and take their name from the long filament drawn out of the upper lobe of the tail. The monocle breams, Scolopsis, went the other way. They stayed on the reef edge, and they are the half of the family a diver actually meets.

The dotted bream is the one you will meet most often here. It holds a hand's width off shallow sand next to coral, alone or in loose groups, and it does not so much swim as jerk: a short burst, a stop, a tilt of the head toward the bottom, another burst. Watch one long enough and it will drop onto the sand and take something out of it.

The pattern is the name. Rows of dark brown to black dots run the length of the flank, packed closely enough to read as broken stripes with white gaps between them, and a pearly white bar runs from below the eye back to the top of the pectoral fin base. The pelvic fins are long, reaching to the vent. Juveniles are marked quite differently and are worth a second look before you decide what you are holding a photograph of.

Under the eye, on the bone that carries it, sits a small blade of a spine. That spine is the genus mark, and in this species it does not point forward, which is one of the characters used to sort the 🌊 Red Sea Scolopsis out from each other. What it hunts with the rest of its head is crustaceans, molluscs, brittle stars and small fish.

FishBase gives 30 cm as the maximum with 12 cm ordinary, and the regional guide records 18 cm here. It lives between 1 and 20 m across the western 🌊 Indian Ocean, from the 🌊 Red Sea and the Gulf out to 🇲🇬 Madagascar and the Andaman Islands.