Three unrelated patterns on one small fish, hanging in a coral head all day.
A cardinalfish to about 8.5 cm, put together as if from three different fish — a yellow-olive head with a red eye, a single broad black bar behind the pectoral fin, and a rear half of silver-white scattered with orange-red spots. The break between the sections is abrupt. The effect is thought to work as disruptive camouflage in a coral head, where the eye reads the bar as a shadow and the sections as separate objects.
Sits in loose groups of a dozen or more among the branches of Porites and other branching corals through the day, drifting nose-down and moving very little, and disperses out over rubble and sand at night to feed on plankton. Males are mouthbrooders: the male holds the egg mass in his mouth for around a week, not feeding, and a brooding fish is recognised by a distended jaw and by the way it chews to turn the eggs. Recorded from the shallows to about 15 m. Common, stationary by day and easy to approach — a good subject on which to work out lighting a fish inside a coral head.
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.
