Masked pufferfish

Photo: Sylvain Le Bris · CC BY-NC

The masked pufferfish is a Red Sea endemic whose bold black mask and polka-dot pattern make it immediately recognisable grazing on algae and invertebrates across Shaab Sharm's rubble zones. When threatened it inflates its elastic stomach with water to become a near-spherical ball, making ingestion by a predator geometrically difficult. Their beak-like fused teeth are strong enough to bite through hard coral, and they leave characteristic semi-circular bite marks that are visible across the reef as evidence of their feeding activity.