---
title: Bluestreak Cleaner Wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus)
scientific_name: Labroides dimidiatus
common_name: Bluestreak Cleaner Wrasse
taxon: Wrasse
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-10-28T18:14:41.746Z
updated: 2026-08-12T11:38:13.427Z
tags: Bluestreak Cleaner Wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus, Wrasse, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/wrasse/bluestreak-cleaner-wrasse
---

# Bluestreak Cleaner Wrasse (*Labroides dimidiatus*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Wrasse (*Labridae*)
- **Size:** up to 14 cm
- **Depth:** 1-40 m
- **Diet:** Cleaner
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Common
- **Habitat:** A fixed cleaning station on the reef, held for years
- **Reproduction:** Egg layer, Protogynous hermaphrodite
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- small slim fish, white in front shading to blue, with a black stripe widening to the tail
- swims with an exaggerated up-and-down dance to advertise
- always at the same spot, with a queue of larger fish waiting
- length up to 14 cm

A slim fish with a black stripe that widens toward the tail, dancing up and down over the same square meter of reef year after year. That dance is an advertisement, and the queue in front of it is the business.

Client fish arrive, hold still, spread their fins and open their mouths and gill covers, and the wrasse goes over them removing parasites and dead tissue - including inside the mouth of predators that would eat it in any other context. Reefs where cleaners were experimentally removed lost fish diversity within months: the service is load-bearing for the whole community.

It cheats, and the cheating is why the species is so studied. A cleaner prefers client mucus to parasites, and taking a bite of healthy mucus makes the client jolt and leave. So cleaners cheat less with clients that have somewhere else to go, more with captive ones, and behave better when other fish are watching them work - reputation management in a fish, tested experimentally many times over.

It also passed a mirror mark test in 2019: an individual with a mark placed where it can only be seen in a mirror tried to scrape it off. Whether that means self-recognition is argued about, loudly, and this animal is at the center of it.

## Also known as

- **English:** bluestreak cleaner wrasse, Blue-streak Cleaner Wrasse, cleaner wrasse
- **Hebrew:** נקאי אילתי
- **French:** Labre nettoyeur à rayure bleue, Nettoyeur à bande bleue, Labre nettoyeur commun
- **Italian:** Labride pulitore
- **German:** Gewöhnlicher Putzerlippfisch
- **Spanish:** Lábrido Limpiador Común
- **Portuguese:** Bodião-limpador-comum
- **Dutch:** Gewone Poetslipvis
- **Polish:** Wargatek Sanitarnik
- **Czech:** pyskoun rozpůlený
- **Japanese:** ホンソメワケベラ, Hon-somewakebera, Honsomewakebera
- **Chinese:** 半帶擬隆鯛, 柳冷仔, 漂漂
- **Russian:** Голубой губанчик
- **AF:** Bloustreep-skoonmakertjie
- **DA:** Pudsefisk
- **FI:** Puhdistaja
- **KO:** 청줄청소놀래기
- **TAH:** po'ou
- **TGL:** Bunak, Mameng
- **TH:** ปลาพยาบาล

## Scientific synonyms

- *Cossyphus dimidiatus* Valenciennes, 1839
- *Fissilabrus dimidiatus* (Valenciennes, 1839)
- *Labroides dimidatus* (Valenciennes, 1839)

## Range

Comoros, Federal Republic of Somalia, Indian Ocean, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Red Sea, Republic of Mauritius, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/wrasse/bluestreak-cleaner-wrasse)*
*Updated: August 12, 2026*