A small fanged blenny of seagrass and sand that lays its eggs inside empty containers.
A slender blenny to about 8 cm, pale olive to yellow-brown with a dark stripe along the flank that breaks into dashes on some animals and is nearly absent on others, and with a scatter of small dark spots over the head. The colour is as variable as the name suggests and is not much use on its own. The lower jaw carries a pair of large curved canines, as in the rest of the genus, and the fish uses them in disputes with its own kind rather than on other species.
It lives over seagrass, weedy sand and the debris margins of sheltered bays, hanging just clear of the bottom or resting on a blade or a stem. It is not a mimic in the sense that the false cleanerfish is, but its shape and the fangs are close enough to the venomous Meiacanthus fangblennies that the resemblance is generally read as protective.
The habit that makes it a muck animal is the choice of nest. Males take up residence inside a hollow object on the bottom, an empty bottle, a can, a length of pipe or a large empty shell, and the eggs are attached in a sheet to the inside surface and guarded there. A bottle on a sand slope with a small blenny facing out of the neck is one of the routine finds on this ground. Recorded through the Indo-West Pacific in shallow water.
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.