A year ago, the famous Jordanian fisherman, Dr. Marwan Shreim, was on the verge of discovering the first appearance of the oceanic stingray "Petroplatitrigon violacea", popularly known as the "devil fish", in the Red Sea, after it accidentally got caught on his fishing line.
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But not all scientific discoveries in the Red Sea happen in this way, as a Japanese research team was in for more dramatic events that took place at the National Museum of Natural History in the Dutch city of Leiden, which led to the first recorded appearance of the goatfish in the Red Sea.
The museum houses a huge collection of fish specimens collected from different parts of the world. Among these specimens are two small fish, measuring approximately 63.8 and 73.9 millimeters in length, which caught the attention of Japanese researchers Ayumi Bandai and Harutaka Hata, affiliated with research institutions in Okinawa, Japan, during a scientific mission at the museum.
The two specimens were not new, as information in the museum's records indicates that they were collected from the coasts of Jeddah on the Red Sea more than a century ago (146 years), specifically in 1880, but they did not attract attention throughout that period, until the two Japanese researchers reopened their anatomical file, concluding that they belonged to what is known as the "spotted goatfish".
This fish gets its name from the pair of sensory tentacles located below its mouth, which resemble a goat's beard. These tentacles are not merely decorative appendages; they are sensory organs that help the fish search for food on the seabed, moving among the sand and gravel to detect small prey such as crustaceans, worms, and other benthic organisms.
The range of this fish extends from the Gulf of Aden and the coasts of Oman across vast areas of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but the Red Sea remained outside its documented distribution map. Therefore, when the two Japanese researchers discovered the distinctive mark of the goatfish in the samples collected from the coasts of Jeddah, they realized that they were close to a scientific discovery that would record the first appearance of that fish in the Red Sea.
That sign was not enough to definitively prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the two specimens kept by the Leiden City Museum since 1880 were of the "spotted goatfish" species. In fish classification, very different species may look very similar in appearance, color, and body size, so researchers need to examine minute details of the fish's body to prove that it actually belongs to this species.
During the examination, a set of signs appeared that were identical in the two specimens. The fish had 8 spines in the dorsal fin, 17 thin supports known as fin rays inside the pectoral fin, 29 or 30 rows of gill arches, in addition to 27 scales on the lateral line. The sensory appendages under the mouth were about 67-68.5% of the length of the head.
The most striking feature was its coloration: a black line began at the front of the head, passed through the eye, and extended towards the base of the second dorsal fin, with a round black spot on the lateral line near the caudal peduncle. In contrast, the second dorsal fin remained a uniform, pale color, without any distinctive markings.
All these marks together formed an anatomical “fingerprint” of the “spotted goatfish”, which prompted the researchers to confidently announce, via the International Journal of Marine Sciences, “the first record in the Red Sea of the spotted goatfish from Saudi Arabia.”
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