---
title: Piano Fangblenny (Plagiotremus tapeinosoma)
scientific_name: Plagiotremus tapeinosoma
common_name: Piano Fangblenny
taxon: Combtooth blenny
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-11-16T04:56:30.737Z
updated: 2026-08-14T11:36:01.801Z
tags: Piano Fangblenny, Plagiotremus tapeinosoma, Combtooth blenny, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/combtooth-blenny/piano-fangblenny
---

# Piano Fangblenny (*Plagiotremus tapeinosoma*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Combtooth blenny (*Blenniidae*)
- **Size:** up to 14 cm
- **Depth:** 0-45 m
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Common
- **Habitat:** Reef and lagoon, hovering above the bottom
- **Reproduction:** Egg layer, Gonochoric
- **Hazard:** Venomous
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- slim dark body with a bright yellow stripe and fine dark bars on the flank
- hovers and darts rather than perching
- usually near a school of something else it is pretending to belong to
- length up to 14 cm

A slim yellow-striped blenny hanging in open water beside a school of something larger - and not a member of it.

Where its bluestriped relative impersonates a cleaner, this one joins the crowd. It slips in alongside schooling fish of similar size and coloring, moves as they move, and takes bites of scale and mucus from them at close range. The school tolerates a member it cannot quite identify; the blenny eats.

It has the same equipment as the rest of the group: two long curved fangs in the lower jaw, backed by a venom gland whose contents work on pain and blood pressure rather than on tissue. The point is not to hurt a fish, it is to make a bitten fish lose the thread long enough for a 14 cm animal to leave.

It shelters in abandoned worm tubes and small holes, reversing in tail-first and leaving only the head out - which is where to look for one once the schooling act is over.

## Also known as

- **English:** piano fangblenny, Hit and Run Blenny, scale-eating blenny
- **French:** Blennie piano
- **Japanese:** テンクロスジギンポ, Tenkurosujigimpo

## Scientific synonyms

- *Aspidontus tapeinosoma* (Bleeker, 1857)
- *Petroscirtes tapeinosoma* Bleeker, 1857
- *Petroskirtes tapeinosoma* Bleeker, 1857
- *Plagiotremus tapeinosomus* (Bleeker, 1857)
- *Runula tapeinosoma* (Bleeker, 1857)

## Range

Indian Ocean, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, New Zealand, Red Sea, Republic of Mauritius, Seychelles, South Africa

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/combtooth-blenny/piano-fangblenny)*
*Updated: August 14, 2026*