A small pale wrasse with two dark stripes, working the bottom constantly and following anything that turns over rubble.
To about 22 cm. Two dark stripes run the length of the body, one from the snout through the eye to the tail base and a fainter one below it, and there is a two-tone black and orange spot on the upper edge of the gill cover sitting inside the upper stripe. Large terminal males are green and pink with pink lines radiating from the eye and converging pink stripes on the tail.
The blackear wrasse shares the same shallow seagrass and reef edges. The spot settles it: on the gill cover and inside an unbroken stripe here, immediately behind the eye and with no continuous stripe there.
One to fifteen metres, and it is commonest very shallow, working constantly over rubble, sand, seagrass and macroalgae for snails, crustaceans, worms and small fish. It breeds in leks and every fish starts as a female.
FishBase gives a maximum of 35 cm and STRI 22. The smaller figure is the one a diver will recognise.
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.