In January 2009, the fish photograph was sent to Dr. Kent Carpenter of the Department of Biological Science of the Old Dominion University, Virginia, USA for identification. After about a month, Dr. Carpenter identified the fish as Apogon griffini (Seale, 1910), a rarely seen kind of cardinal fish called northern spiny dogfish. Seale described this species from Bantayan Island, Philippines in 1910. The genus of this species was renamed to Ostorhinchus (Fishbase 2014).