Scrawled filefish

Amazing fact

Young scrawled filefish swim head-down beside drifting seaweed to avoid being spotted by predators.

Florida Museum of Natural History

Scrawled filefish in its habitat (illustration)

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An illustration based on the real animal.

A little discovery to share.

Young scrawled filefish swim head-down beside drifting seaweed to avoid being spotted by predators.

SourceFlorida Museum of Natural History — Scrawled Filefish

THE REAL WORLD

The real Scrawled filefish

Scientific name: Aluterus scriptus
Japanese name: ソウシハギ
Group: Ocean animals

Order: Tetraodontiformes
Family: Monacanthidae
Genus: Aluterus

Facts about the real animal.

Its body is scattered with small black dots and wiggly, worm-shaped blue markings.

鳥羽水族館 — ソウシハギ

Its internal organs sometimes contain a poison like palytoxin.

鳥羽水族館 — ソウシハギ

It lives widely, from the seas of Japan between Hokkaido and the Ryukyu Islands to temperate and tropical seas around the world.

鳥羽水族館 — ソウシハギ

How the Scrawled filefish lives

Young fish spread widely while traveling with drifting seaweed. They eat algae, seagrass, tunicates, and other food. At night they rest in reef crevices, raising spines to wedge themselves in place.

新潟市水族館マリンピア日本海 Florida Museum of Natural History

Basic data

Range: Temperate and tropical seas worldwide, and elsewhere

鳥羽水族館

Where the Scrawled filefish has been recorded

Records: GBIF.org (CC0 and CC BY 4.0 records, retrieved 2026-11-07). Map: Natural EarthSee the records on GBIF

Watch wild animals from a distance. Do not touch or feed them, and take care of the places where they live.

Names around the world

日本語: ソウシハギ
简体中文: 拟态革鲀
繁體中文: 長尾革單棘魨
한국어: 날개쥐치
Español: Lija Trompa
Français: Baliste écriture
Deutsch: Schrift-Feilenfisch
Português (Brasil): Cangulovelho
Italiano: Pesce lima scrittura
Bahasa Indonesia: Sonang ekor sapu
Русский: Расписной единорог
ไทย: ปลาวัวหางพัด

Names come from Wikidata and iNaturalist records. Where a language has no recorded name, we use the scientific name.

Sources and how we check

鳥羽水族館 — ソウシハギChecked: 2026-11-04
Florida Museum of Natural History — Scrawled FilefishChecked: 2026-11-07
新潟市水族館マリンピア日本海 — ソウシハギChecked: 2026-11-07

We check each fact against its source. The illustrations simplify how the real animal looks.

The classification (class, order, family, genus) follows Wikidata records, checked against GBIF. Classifications can change as research goes on.

The basic data are the values given in each source. They vary with how the animal is measured, whether it is male or female, and whether it lives in the wild or in captivity.

This page was translated from the original Japanese with the help of AI.

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