Dark brown with pale yellow stripes that multiply and then break into dashes as the fish grows.
A stout, blunt-headed fish to about 30 cm, dark brown to near black with pale yellow stripes running lengthways along the body. The stripe count changes with age, which is useful in the water: small fish carry two or three broad stripes, half-grown fish five or six, and the largest animals have them broken into rows of dashes and spots so that the striped pattern is barely readable. The eye is large and the skin has a soft, slightly greasy look under a light.
It spends daylight far back in crevices, under ledges and inside dead coral, usually with only the head showing, and comes out onto rubble after dark. Movement is slow and it does not flee from a diver in the way most fish of this size do, which is a consequence of what its skin carries rather than of tameness. Feeding is on small fishes and crustaceans taken by suction at close range.
Recorded across the Indo-Pacific from the shallows to about 40 m. The barred soapfish Diploprion bifasciatus, which has its own entry, secretes the same class of skin toxin and shares the same immunity from being eaten. Night dives account for most photographs, and a fish out on open rubble in a beam will usually hold still long enough to be worked properly.
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.
