Mimics the cleaner wrasse closely and bites the clients that come to be cleaned.
A blenny to about 11 cm that copies the cleaner wrasse Labroides dimidiatus closely: the same white body shading to blue behind, the same black stripe running from the snout to the tail and broadening as it goes. Two things separate them. The blenny’s mouth is set underneath a projecting snout, so the head reads as blunt and overshot, while the wrasse’s mouth is terminal at the point of the head. And they move differently, the blenny swimming in short undulating darts and resting on the bottom or in a hole, the wrasse hovering continuously and working with quick beats of the pectoral fins. At any distance the mimicry is good enough that neither divers nor fish reliably separate them. Juveniles are dark with a blue stripe, matching juvenile Labroides.
The mimicry is a feeding strategy. Fish that approach expecting to be cleaned are bitten instead, the blenny taking scales, skin and fin tissue and retreating; it also feeds on the tentacle crowns of tube worms and on fish eggs. Colour forms vary between regions and correspond to the local cleaner wrasse, which is what the mimicry has to match.
It shelters in vacated worm tubes and holes in rubble and wreckage, reversing in tail-first with only the head at the entrance, and that is the position it is most often photographed in. Recorded from the shallows to about 25 m. A cleaner that darts away and reverses into a hole rather than holding station at a fixed site is this fish rather than the wrasse.
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.