Sand steenbras

Biology

The sand steenbras has a silver body marked with about fourteen vertical dark bands. It prefers bays or estuaries, where it lives near the sandy or muddy bottoms as well as seagrass-beds. It feeds on worms, molluscs and small crustaceans. It can form schools of variable size.

Conservation

It is considered a very tasty fish, and is harvested mainly in the Canary Islands and in the Mediterranean Sea, where it has been declining during the past few years.

Curiosities

As a protandric hermaphrodite, the sand steenbras starts its adult life as a male and later changes its sex to female.