Look on the walls and the ceilings, not the floor. Triplefins have no swim bladder, so up and down mean nothing to them: a fish that sinks the moment it stops swimming is as comfortable clinging upside down under an overhang as sitting on a flat rock, and this species spends much of its life on vertical faces and cave roofs where almost no other small fish bothers to go.
That opens a whole surface. The undersides of ledges are shaded, current-swept, covered in sponge, hydroid and encrusting growth, and largely unoccupied by grazers. A fish that can hold station there upside down has the place to itself.
It was described in 1980 by Eugenie Clark, who also named the sand-diver on this site and whose work on the Moses sole gave the world its best-known shark repellent, and she named it for Heinz Steinitz, who founded the marine lab at Eilat. Between the two of them a good part of what is known about this sea was written down.
Red on rock, six centimeters, in the top twelve meters. Look up.
The genus. Helcogramma McCulloch & Waite 1918 - gramme (line). ETYFish
- red to orange body, often on a vertical or overhanging surface
- three separate dorsal fins
- clings upside down under ledges as readily as sitting upright
- up to 6 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
