A small purple-and-orange wrasse that lives inside coral branches and rarely leaves them.
To about 8 cm, with a purple-magenta body carrying six orange horizontal lines, a green tail and a small dark spot at its base. It is one of the few small wrasses here that can be named on sight without a photograph.
It lives among the branches of coral heads and in rubble, feeding on small crustaceans, and rarely rises more than a few centimetres above cover. That habit makes it common but difficult: it is nearly always partly obscured, and the practical approach is to find a colony it is working and wait at a fixed distance for it to cross an open gap. It is territorial towards other small wrasses. Recorded from about 3 to 35 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.