A small striped fish that swarms around divers on east coast reef and follows anything that disturbs the bottom.
To about 25 cm. Compressed with a small head, a pointed snout, a large eye, a small mouth and a forked tail, silvery-white with about six dark brown to black horizontal stripes and mostly yellow fins.
It shoals with the silver sweep and the separation is simply that this fish has stripes at all — the sweep is plain grey-silver.
Nought to thirty metres on rocky reef, around wharf pylons and jetties, in harbours, bays and large estuaries. It is an opportunistic planktivore and it swarms to any disturbance of the bottom, so a diver’s fin-wash will pull a crowd in. It also cleans other fish, which is unusual for a chub-like fish and is documented for this species.
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.