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Fish

Spotted dragonet

Callionymus maculatus

Callionymus maculatus Rafinesque, 1810 · Callionymidae WoRMS 126793

Reference photos

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A small dragonet of sandy bottoms, and a deeper-water fish than its common relative, recorded between 45 and 650 m where the common dragonet is given as 1 to 440 m and usually 5 to 30 m. It reaches 17 cm, well short of the common dragonet's 30.5 cm. The gill cover carries four spines, and the male's dorsal fin has four spots in a row where the female has two.

Depth

45-650 m

Size

Up to 17.0 cm total length; the heaviest recorded weighed 36.57 g

Habitat

Benthic on sandy bottoms

Behaviour

Feeds on small bottom invertebrates, and its eggs and larvae drift in the plankton

Diet

I eat

  • Small bottom-living crustaceans, including amphipods, ostracods, shrimps and prawns, and crabs
  • Bottom-living worms, including polychaetes
  • Small seabed molluscs, both snails and bivalves

Eats me

  • Gurnards: the grey gurnard, the red gurnard and the tub gurnard
  • Poor cod, a member of the cod family
  • Larger predatory fish, including European hake, John Dory and the Atlantic stargazer

Where you'd find it

Found all around Britain and Ireland, so you have a chance of seeing it anywhere on the coast.

ChannelCeltic SeaNorth SeaIrish SeaW of IrelandW of Scotland
Often seenWhere PEBL filmsBased on marine survey records (OBIS). Blank seas can mean nobody has looked there, not that the animal is absent.

Sources

Open-access references behind this page. Every statement on this page was read out of one of them; anything that could not be traced to a source was taken off the page rather than left standing. Each link was checked on the date shown, and confirmed then to be about this species.

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