A long cigar-shaped wrasse that dives into open sand when alarmed and to sleep.
An elongate, almost cylindrical wrasse to about 40 cm, much more slender than the body shape most divers expect from the family. Initial-phase fish are brown to olive-green with narrow pale rings encircling the body; terminal males are dark green-blue with narrow blue-green bars, a pale to yellowish band immediately behind the head and blue lines on the face. Juveniles are pale with two or three dark longitudinal stripes, are far more slender again, and are regularly logged as an unrelated fish.
The main confusion is with the pastel ringed wrasse Hologymnosus doliatus, which shares the shape and the ringed pattern but is much paler overall, has more numerous and narrower bars, and whose terminal male carries a broad pale band on the flank rather than the dark ground of annulatus. Body colour rather than the bars themselves is the practical separation.
It hunts small fishes and crustaceans, cruising fast over rubble and sand at the reef edge and reversing direction often. Like the rest of the genus it dives head first into open sand when alarmed and buries there overnight, so a fish that vanishes on a flat sand patch has generally gone under it rather than away. It keeps moving and does not tolerate pursuit, and it is more often photographed by waiting on a rubble patch it is working than by following it. Recorded from about 6 to 40 m, and it is more often found on the deeper half of a slope than the shallows.
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.