A pale triggerfish drawn on with blue and yellow lines across the snout and bold black stripes at the tail, up to 30 cm (12 in). It works shallow sand and rubble beside the reef, and it is one of the most-photographed fish here because it holds still and looks painted.
It lives only in this region. The species runs from the 🌊 Red Sea into the 🌊 Gulf of Aden and the 🌊 Persian Gulf and no further, replaced elsewhere by the Picasso triggerfishes of the wider Indo-Pacific - so the fish that tourists call by the Hawaiian name is, here, a different and local animal.
Feeding is done by moving the bottom. It blows water at sand, turns small stones and picks out urchins, worms and crustaceans, crushing them with a heavy jaw, and follows the same route through its patch each day.
At nesting time it becomes a problem. A guarding fish defends a cone of water above the nest that widens toward the surface, and it will charge and bite anything inside it. Swimming up puts you further in; the way out is sideways and low. The bite is not venomous and is entirely capable of removing a piece of a fin or a finger.
The genus. Rhinecanthus Swainson 1839 - rhine (rasp) + acanthus (thorn or spine). ETYFish
The species. Rhinecanthus assasi (Fabricius 1775) - latinization of Azzazi. ETYFish
- pale body with a dark band from the eye to the pectoral fin and bold black stripes at the tail
- blue and yellow lines drawn across the snout, as if painted on
- yellow line running from the mouth back toward the gills
- length up to 30 cm
Why it's threatened
Rhinecanthus assasi is occasionally taken by bottom trawls in the Persian Gulf (Carpenter et al. 1997), but this is not thought to be a major threat at this time (K. Matsuura pers. comm. 2014).
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
