FishCommonVisible while snorkeling

Houndfish

Tylosurus crocodilus

A silver javelin just below the surface: the metre-long houndfish darts centimetres beneath the waterline – and leaps clear of it at full speed.

Photo: iNaturalist – (c) Philippe Bourjon, some rights reserved (CC BY-SA)

The houndfish (Tylosurus crocodilus) is the largest of the needlefish family: its arrow-straight, silver-gleaming body regularly exceeds a metre around Hurghada. Both jaws are drawn out into a beak packed with long, needle-sharp teeth – that beak and the greenish-blue back make it unmistakable. Its silver-white belly melts into the bright mirror of the surface when seen from below: perfect camouflage for life at the waterline.

It spends its entire life in the topmost layer of water, patrolling above the reefs alone or in loose bands and snatching sardines, silversides and other small schooling fish with lightning-fast sideways strikes. When chasing a school or startled, it launches its whole body clear of the water and can skip across the surface several times like a thrown flat stone. Juveniles often hunt in the coastal shallows, practically over the sandbars.

Around Hurghada snorkelers see it most often: a few silver javelins are nearly always zig-zagging just under the surface over the shallow plateaus of Dolphin House and Shaab Sabina, in the Giftun lagoons and in the bay of Abu Hashish. As a diver you meet it during your safety stop, when the gleaming silhouette sweeps past overhead – from the surface it is often just a flash, gone by the time you register it.

Did you know?

It is an unbeatable jumper: fleeing or hunting, it rockets out of the water at up to 60 km/h and skips across the surface like a flat pebble – which is why night fishermen are wary of luring it with bright lamps.

How to behave around it

It is practically harmless to divers and snorkelers: it never attacks, only veers elegantly away. The single known risk is the rare night-time incident of a fish leaping at a strong light and accidentally colliding with someone – so avoid shining a beam steadily across the surface at night. By day, admire it from as close as you like.

Where can you meet it?

It hunts near the surface over every shallow Hurghada reef: an encounter is close to guaranteed on the plateaus of Dolphin House and Shaab Sabina, in the Giftun lagoons and the bay of Abu Hashish.

Frequently asked questions

It is not a barracuda, though many confuse the two – the houndfish is slimmer and has a long beak-like mouth. It never attacks people; the only risk is that at night it may leap towards a strong light and collide with something, which is why we never shine torches across the surface after dark.

This is very much a snorkeler's species: it spends its whole life near the surface, so you meet it far more often swimming than at depth. Look ahead just under the waterline – that silver flash you first take for a glint of light is quite likely a houndfish.

For two reasons: while hunting it cuts the corner towards a fleeing school through the air, and when chased by a bigger predator – tuna, dolphin – it simply vanishes from the pursuer's view above the surface. After launching it skips onward like a stone, which is an astonishing sight in itself.