Triggerfish nest in a crater in the sand, and the female guards it. What matters to a diver is the shape of what she is guarding: it is not a circle on the bottom, it is a cone, standing on the nest and widening upward toward the surface. Swim up to get clear and you stay inside it the whole way. Swim horizontally, low and away, and you are out of it in a few meters.
That rule matters most with the big titan triggerfish, which is three times this size and will follow a diver a long way. This one is twenty-two centimeters, and the worst it will realistically do is charge, turn away, and make you jump.
It lives here and in the 🌊 Gulf of Aden and nowhere else, on shallow reef and in lagoons with sand patches to dig in, and it is one of the commoner triggerfish on this coast.
Watch how it swims. Triggerfish move by rippling the dorsal and anal fins against each other and keep the tail folded and unused, which gives them fine control at low speed. The tail is held in reserve, and it comes out only when the fish needs to be somewhere else immediately.
- brown body with a white bar at the base of the tail
- males with a blue throat
- small upturned mouth on a steep blunt head
- swims by rippling the dorsal and anal fins, tail held still
- up to 22 cm
