Critically Endangered
Red handfish
Thymichthys politus
Red handfish is a ray-finned fish in the family Brachionichthyidae (order Lophiiformes) — Thymichthys politus, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
The red handfish is distinguished by its small, flattened, wart-like protuberances that cover its body and its red colouration. Two colour morphs exist, a bright red morph with red colour on both body and fins, with a black line separating the white fin edges, and a mottled morph with pink body covered in many red patches, with translucent pink fins expressing some bright red patches.
Range and habitat
Historically, the species was found in multiple subpopulations in Tasmania, among them Port Arthur, Fortescue Bay, the Actaeon Islands, D'Entrecasteaux Channel, and the Forestier Peninsula. Currently, the species has been found only on two small reefs in Frederick Henry Bay. It is found at depth ranges from 1 to 20 m deep.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Little is known about their diet, but that it consists of animals that live in the benthos, among them small crustaceans and polychaete worms. Each egg mass contains 30-60 eggs that are connected by tubules bound together.
In crisis
The IUCN classify the red handfish as critically endangered. General threats to red handfish include small, very fragmented populations and local increases in density of native purple urchins, that overgraze the seaweed habitat required for shelter and spawning for the red handfish. Summer observations of low seaweed on urchin barrens suggest that loss of seaweed habitat might represent a key threat to long-term viability of the population.
Red handfish is Critically 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 Red handfish, Wikidata item Q6424331. 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.
