A silver fish crossed by three or four curved dark stripes that arch from the head to the tail like drawn bows, with black blotches on the tail lobes. Up to 36 cm (14 in), and it lives where nothing else does: the wash at the edge of a beach, sometimes in a few centimeters of water.
It talks. The name grunter is literal - muscles vibrate against the swim bladder and produce a grunt audible in air when the fish is landed, used in disputes and when alarmed.
Young fish are partly scale-eaters. Juveniles approach larger fish and strike the flank to knock scales loose and eat them, a habit shared with the queenfish and a handful of unrelated families, before switching to whole prey as they grow.
It handles fresh and brackish water well enough to run up rivers, and it is one of the first fish to recolonize a lagoon after a flood. That toughness, plus a taste for shallow disturbed water, makes it a common catch off beaches everywhere in the warm Indo-Pacific and an easy fish to see without a boat.
The species. Terapon jarbua (Fabricius 1775) - Arabic name for this fish. ETYFish
- silver body with three or four curved dark stripes arching from head to tail
- black blotches on the tail lobes and the spiny dorsal fin
- in the wash of the shoreline, in water sometimes a few centimeters deep
- length up to 36 cm
Why it's threatened
No information available.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
