We have Belly Bars!

No, it’s not some new tattoo but a new cardinalfish.

It has taken Miguel’s Diving staff a couple of visits back to the same patch of sand to identify the schools of cardinalfish that seem suddenly to have appeared. One group of about a dozen shelters in the same clump of branching fire coral where last year we found a pair of ghost pipefish. As if the fire coral is not enough, the spot is aggressively guarded by three Saddleback anemonefish (Amphiprion polymnus). They click their teeth vigorously while rushing at your dive mask. Since their anemone is not to be seen, perhaps they are guarding eggs. Also hovering around the sand is an unusual juvenile lionfish, opaque white with narrow bars. The outer edges of its pectoral fins have a string of large pink spots. All that protection has made it difficult to get a close look at those cardinalfish.

Only named in 1994, the Belly-barred cardinalfish (Apogon ventrifasciatus) is a beautiful reddish brown with white lines through its eyes, a distinctive white dorsal spot, and faint belly bars. Another group hovers nearby around a sand anemone. Both groups are in only three meters of water. Known from the Indo-Malay Archipelago to the Solomon Islands, we have yet to find this fish at other locations.