Cryptobenthic:
- Of fish: both benthic (living on or near the seafloor) and cryptic (hiding in crevices, or camouflaged). [Wiktionary]
Noted in “The tiniest fish are the most important for healthy coral reefs,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (1 June 2019):
… Simon Brandl has been studying “cryptobenthic” reef fish that are less than 50 millimetres long as adults – basically, the ones you don’t see when snorkelling or diving on a reef. When he looked at surveys of plankton near reefs around the world, he was surprised to discover that 70 per cent of the fish larvae were of these cryptobenthic species.
