Dark with five pale bars and heavy lips; the coral-reef half of a pair with the blackeye thicklip.
A heavy-bodied wrasse to about 50 cm with conspicuously thick fleshy lips, a dark brown to greenish body crossed by five narrow pale vertical bars, and a green-blue head marked with pink to orange lines radiating back from the eye. Juveniles are the same fish in sharper contrast, black and white banded with a paler head, and are common in shallow rubble where the adults are not.
It pairs against the blackeye thicklip wrasse Hemigymnus melapterus, which shares the lips, the head lines and the general shape but is never barred: adult melapterus is pale grey-white over the front half and abruptly dark over the rear, and its juvenile is a hard-edged white front and black rear. Bars against two tones is the whole separation and it holds at every size, which is worth knowing because the two are frequently logged as one another.
Both species feed by taking a mouthful of sand or fine rubble, sorting the small crustaceans, worms and molluscs out of it inside the mouth and blowing the sediment back out through the gills, and the thick lips are used to pick prey directly off rock. The barred species is the more coral-associated of the two: it works reef with living coral and structure and is regular where that habitat is intact, while it thins markedly on the silty rubble slopes of Lembeh Strait and Dauin, where melapterus is the thicklip a diver actually meets. Recorded from the shallows to about 30 m.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.