A blenny that swims in the open with anthias and looks enough like them to get away with it.
To about 13 cm, slender for a blenny, yellow-orange to dull olive with a blue ring around the eye and a lyre-shaped tail. Colour shifts with the fish’s surroundings and mood: an individual feeding among anthias is usually orange, and the same fish back in its hole may be grey-brown.
Most blennies perch on the bottom; this one leaves it, joining aggregations of scalefin anthias in mid-water to take zooplankton, and its shape and colour in that setting are close enough to the anthias to pass at a glance. It shelters in a small hole in rock or dead coral and reverses into it tail-first. A blenny’s head protruding from a hole at eye level on a wall is the usual photograph; the mid-water behaviour is the more interesting one. Recorded from about 3 to 40 m.
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.