A small orange-red triplefin with three white lines, perched on sponge and dead coral.
A triplefin to about 4 cm, orange to red over the body with three narrow white or pale blue lines running from behind the head to the tail. The head of a breeding male turns dark, often almost black, so that the white lines stop at the neck and the fish looks like two animals joined; females and non-breeding males keep the colour forward to the snout. The dorsal fin is in three separate parts, which is the family character and is visible in any reasonably close photograph.
It perches on hard surfaces rather than on sand, using sponges, dead coral, tunicate clumps and the vertical faces of rubble, and holds position by resting on the pelvic fins. Movement is in short hops. Feeding is on small crustaceans picked off the surface it is sitting on. Males hold a patch of substrate through the breeding period and guard the eggs laid on it.
Recorded from a few metres to about 20 m through the western Pacific. On muck sites it turns up on the hard scraps rather than on open sediment, which puts it on the same stones as the small scorpionfishes and the clingfishes and makes it a common accidental find while something else is being photographed.
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.