Red Sea goby Red Sea goby The Red Sea goby (Silhouettea aegyptia) is a species of true goby from the family Gobiidae. It was once a species confined to the Red Sea but it has colonised the Suez Canal and the south-eastern Mediterranean by Lessepsian migration. The Red Sea goby is marked with many dark vertical spots which have reddish brown edges on a cream background colour. There are 9 or 10 dark spots along the lateral line. It has a short snout and in males the first spine of the first dorsal fin is elongated. There are no scales on the head
Mediterranean Sea or Islamic sources. It may be to contrast with the Black Sea. In Persian, the name was translated as "Baḥr-i Safīd", which was also used in later Ottoman Turkish. It is probably the origin of the colloquial Greek Άσπρη Θάλασσα. Johann Knobloch claims that in Classical Antiquity, cultures in the Levant used colours to refer to the cardinal points: black referred to the north (explaining the name Black Sea), yellow or blue to east, red to south (i.e., the Red Sea), and "white" to west. This would explain both the Turkish "Akdeniz" (White Sea) and the Arab nomenclature described above.