The juvenile tumbles like a scrap of weed; the adult turns over rocks for a living.
Two animals in one life. The juvenile — the dragon wrasse of aquarium shops — is maroon to olive with white blotches, has the first two dorsal spines drawn out into long filaments over the head, and swims with an exaggerated rocking tumble close to the bottom, drifting with the surge in a manner that reads as a torn piece of algae. The adult is a plain grey-brown wrasse to about 30 cm with a pale bar behind the pectoral fin and fine dark lines radiating from the eye, and none of the filaments.
Adults earn the other name. They feed by taking rocks and rubble fragments in the mouth and flipping them aside — a fish will work steadily across a rubble patch, turning stones and eating what is underneath, and often in pairs with one turning and one taking. It is one of the few reef fish that visibly rearranges the substrate, and smaller wrasses follow it to pick over what it uncovers. Recorded from the shallows to about 25 m. Juveniles are the harder photograph, because the tumbling never stops.
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.