Whether this fish exists depends on which authority you ask, and that is worth understanding rather than glossing over.
The regional guide to this sea lists it as a 🌊 Red Sea endemic reaching twenty centimeters, feeding on crabs and snails on shallow rubble. The world register of marine species does not accept the name at all: it treats it as a synonym of the clown coris, a widespread Indo-Pacific fish that grows to over a meter.
Both positions are defensible and the disagreement is ordinary. A species is a hypothesis about which animals belong together, and hypotheses are revised. Specialists working a single basin see local populations closely and tend to split; specialists working a whole ocean see the range of variation across it and tend to lump. Neither is being careless.
What that means in practice is that a dappled twenty-centimeter coris on shallow 🌊 Red Sea rubble is a real animal you can watch, whatever it is eventually called. It works the bottom steadily, turning over small stones for crabs and gastropods, and males, females and juveniles are all patterned differently.
The genus. Coris Lacepède 1801 - korys (helmet). ETYFish
The species. Coris variegata (Rüppell 1835) - variegated. ETYFish
- olive to brown body dappled with pale blotches
- females and juveniles patterned differently from males
- works shallow rubble at a steady pace
- up to 20 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no major threats known for this species, though it may be taken as a bycatch in some local coastal artisanal fisheries.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
