A very small triplefin endemic to the archipelago, on shallow rock and easily overlooked.
To about 3 cm. Five irregular brown bars on the body and another on the tail base, a head heavily mottled with brown and several brown bars running down from the eye. There is a well-developed cirrus over each eye and none on the nape, and the bone carrying the nostrils has a row of small spines on it. The one fish it can be confused with is the multibarred triplefin, which shares this ground, and the tail base separates them: an intense solid black band on the multibarred triplefin, another ordinary brown bar on this one.
Rocky shore in the top five metres, on the bottom, feeding on small snails, bivalves, worms, shrimps and crabs. It is recorded from these islands and nowhere else. Described in 2013 in a paper that also named two new triplefins from mainland Mexico. Nothing about its behaviour has been published, and the two databases disagree on its status, STRI having it unevaluated and FishBase listing it as Least Concern on a 2024 assessment.
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.