A Red Sea wrasse with pink lines radiating across the face over a blue-green body.
To about 20 cm. Green with fine magenta lines running back from the eye across the head, and magenta edges to the fins and tail.
The honest position on this fish is that the sources do not describe separate initial and terminal phases, so this entry does not claim any. Nor is there a clean separator from the moon wrasse, which shares the Red Sea and with which this species is recorded as hybridising; intermediate fish are genuinely ambiguous and should be left as such.
It is restless, working shallow reef tops in fast loops, taking small crustaceans, snails and worms. It follows larger fish to snatch what they disturb, and it does some part-time cleaning of bigger species.
One to thirty metres on reef margins, seaward slopes and in the surge zone. A Red Sea endemic.
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.