Seventeen millimeters of bright red fish, and the name says so in Arabic: qirmiz is crimson, the same root that gave English the word kermes and, by a long route, crimson itself.
Naming a 🌊 Red Sea fish in Arabic rather than Latin or Greek is a small courtesy and a rare one. Most species here carry names built from classical roots or from the surnames of European collectors, and a name taken from the language actually spoken on the coast where the animal lives stands out.
The fish is small enough to be a genuine problem to photograph and it lives in the top nine meters, on rubble and rock, where it perches in the open and is passed over as a speck of color. Red is a useful thing to be at that size: below a few meters there is no red light left to reflect, so a red animal reads as black, and a black speck on dark rock is not worth a predator's attention.
The three separate dorsal fins are the family mark, and on an animal this size they take a macro lens to see at all.
The genus. Enneapterygius Rüppell 1835 - ennea (nine) + pterygion (fin). ETYFish
The species. Enneapterygius qirmiz Holleman & Bogorodsky 2012 - Arabic name for this fish. ETYFish
- brilliant red, and under two centimeters long
- three separate dorsal fins
- males redder and darker than females
- up to 1.7 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
