A small striped blenny that takes bites from the flanks of larger fish and reverses into an empty worm tube when disturbed.
To about 10 cm. Very elongate and slender with a conical strongly overhanging snout and greatly enlarged canines at the front of the lower jaw. A broad brown band runs from the snout through the eye to the tail with a narrow yellow to white stripe immediately above it, and the lower head and body are white. The dorsal fin is dark with a blue-white margin.
It is a mimic. It joins loose groups of juvenile Cortez rainbow wrasse, which it resembles, and darts out of the group to nip at other fish; published work found it has better success when it is with the wrasse, and that it darkens its colour to blend into a wrasse school when there are few blennies about. To tell it from the wrasse: the blenny does not scull with its pectoral fins the way a wrasse does, it hovers rather than swimming, and it shelters head-out in an empty worm tube or barnacle shell, which no wrasse does.
It eats the skin, mucus and scales of larger fish, plus small crustaceans and fish eggs. It strikes and retreats instantly into its tube, showing only the head. It sometimes forms feeding groups of over a hundred to attack larger prey. It lives between about 2 and 25 m.
It does nip divers, and the honest answer is that this is startling rather than harmful. It is not venomous — it is a mimic of the venomous fangblennies rather than one of them — and there is no medical significance to a nip.
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.