Dives head-first into open sand; the juvenile tumbles over the bottom like a dead leaf.
A wrasse to about 35 cm, deep-bodied and strongly compressed side to side, with a steep, almost vertical forehead and a small mouth low on the head. Adults are pale grey to sandy, sometimes with a diffuse dark patch on the mid-flank, and the first two dorsal spines are separated from the rest of the fin. Juveniles look like a different animal: pale grey-brown with dark mottling, those first spines drawn out into a long filament standing over the head, and a habit of drifting and tumbling with the surge a few centimetres off the bottom in a way that reads as a piece of dead leaf. The name razorfish is also used on these sites for the shrimpfish Aeoliscus strigatus, which is a different animal entirely.
Pressed hard, it dives head-first into open sand and disappears, and it can travel some distance under the surface before coming out again, which is the behaviour the group is known for and the reason a fish that vanishes on a bare sand flat has usually not gone far. It feeds on molluscs, crustaceans and worms taken from the sediment, and it lives on featureless bottom well away from structure, which is unusual among wrasses.
The rockmover wrasse Novaculichthys taeniourus is a close relative and its juvenile uses the same drifting-debris disguise. The two separate on the razorfish’s much steeper, almost vertical head profile, and on the juvenile colouring, maroon to olive with white blotches in the rockmover against grey-brown mottling here. Recorded from about 3 to 30 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.