Twobar Anemonefish

Photo: Luis P. B. · CC BY-NC

The Red Sea's endemic anemonefish — found nowhere else in the world — hosts in Entacmaea quadricolor bubble-tip anemones throughout the Coral Beach reserve shallow zone, their distinctive two white bars standing out against orange-red bodies. As protandrous hermaphrodites, the largest individual in each anemone group is female, the second-largest reproductively active male, and all others sexually suppressed sub-adults — a hierarchy maintained by the dominant pair's behavioural control. Long-term monitoring plots at Coral Beach track individual anemone-fish family groups across years, providing some of the longest continuous anemonefish demographic records in the world.