The hogfish family is built for crushing: heavy jaws, protruding canines, throat plates for breaking shells, and a snout for rooting through rubble. This one hovers in open water and eats plankton.
That is what depth does to the family. Below forty meters there is less light, less algae and far fewer of the shelled animals a rooting fish lives on, but there is still a current carrying zooplankton past a drop-off all day. A small fish that can pick individual copepods out of moving water has a food supply down there; a fish that needs a rubble field full of snails does not.
So the deep members of this genus are small, hover well off the bottom, and behave more like anthias than like their own relatives. Seven centimeters against the fifty of a shallow hogfish, and a completely different way of making a living from the same body plan.
It is yellow with a red stripe along the back and another along the belly, and it lives deep enough here that almost nobody has seen one.
The species. Bodianus bimaculatus Allen 1973 - bi- (two) + maculatus (spotted). ETYFish
- small yellow fish with a red stripe along the back and a red stripe along the belly
- dark spot at the base of the tail and another on the dorsal fin
- hovers above the bottom rather than working it
- up to 7 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no major threats known for this species. There is a potential threat from degradation of coral reefs.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
