Green with a magenta-streaked face and a yellow crescent tail; never stops moving.
To about 25 cm, blue-green with magenta to pink streaks radiating across the head and pink markings on the fins, and a yellow crescent in the centre of the tail that is the reliable mark at distance. Juveniles are duller, with a dark blotch on the mid-dorsal fin and a dark tail base.
It is a fast, restless mid-water forager taking small crustaceans, fish eggs and juvenile fish, and it follows other feeding fish — including divers stirring sediment — to take what is exposed. On muck sites it is frequently the fish that arrives the moment a critter is uncovered, which is a good reason not to move things about. Common on reef flats and shallow reef; recorded from the shallows to about 25 m. Photographing it requires pre-focusing on a patch of reef and waiting rather than tracking.
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.