Eduard Ruppell described this fish in 1835, and the reason his name keeps appearing on 🌊 Red Sea species is that he was the first naturalist to work this coast systematically.
He was a Frankfurt merchant's son who spent the 1820s and 1830s traveling in 🇪🇬 Egypt, 🇸🇩 Sudan, Ethiopia and along both shores of this sea, collecting everything, at a time when the trip itself was the dangerous part. He brought back thousands of specimens, described hundreds of species new to science, and funded most of it himself. A large fraction of the fish, corals and molluscs on this site carry either his name as author or a species named after him, and several of the animals in this catalogue were first written down from material he shipped to Frankfurt.
The fish is three centimeters long and lives on coral and rubble between three and twenty meters, which gives some sense of how thorough the collecting was.
Like all triplefins it perches rather than swims, and the three separate dorsal fins along the back are what separate the family from the blennies at a glance.
The genus. Enneapterygius Rüppell 1835 - ennea (nine) + pterygion (fin). ETYFish
The species. Enneapterygius pusillus Rüppell 1835 - very small. ETYFish
- three separate dorsal fins, the first two short and the third long
- pale body with reddish to brown bars
- high first dorsal crest in males
- up to 3 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
