Endangered
Banggai cardinalfish
Pterapogon kauderni
The Banggai cardinalfish is a small tropical cardinalfish in the family Apogonidae.
Appearance
It is easily differentiated from all other cardinalfishes by its tasseled first dorsal fin, elongated anal and second dorsal fin rays, deeply forked caudal fin, and color pattern consisting of three black bars across the head and body and prominent black anterior edges on the anal and second dorsal fin.
This species grows up to 8 centimetres (3 in) total length.
Range and habitat
This species is restricted to the Banggai Islands of Indonesia. This species has an extremely limited geographic range (5,500 km2) and small total population size (estimated at 2.4 million). The Banggai cardinalfish is composed of isolated populations concentrated around the shallows of 17 large and 10 small islands within the Banggai Archipelago.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
The Banggai cardinalfish is the only member of its family that is diurnal. Its diet includes planktonic, demersal, and benthic organisms.
Copepods constitute the bulk of its diet. The pairs form up to 2 weeks prior to spawning. The female courts the male from pair formation until spawning.
In crisis
It is among the relatively few marine fish to have been bred regularly in captivity, but significant numbers are still captured in the wild and it is now an endangered species. The detrimental impact of humans on its environment and certain fatal diseases threaten this species' numbers significantly.
Banggai cardinalfish is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Banggai cardinalfish, Wikidata item Q428921. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
