---
title: Eight-striped Flasher Wrasse (Paracheilinus octotaenia)
scientific_name: Paracheilinus octotaenia
common_name: Eight-striped Flasher Wrasse
taxon: Wrasse
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-10-28T14:11:35.080Z
updated: 2026-08-19T23:21:33.488Z
tags: Eight-striped Flasher Wrasse, Paracheilinus octotaenia, Wrasse, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/wrasse/eight-striped-flasher-wrasse
---

# Eight-striped Flasher Wrasse (*Paracheilinus octotaenia*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Wrasse (*Labridae*)
- **Size:** up to 9 cm
- **Depth:** 5-40 m
- **Diet:** Planktivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Common
- **Habitat:** Rubble slopes and reef edges with current
- **Reproduction:** Protogynous hermaphrodite
- **Endemic:** Endemic to the Red Sea
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- small slender wrasse with fine orange and blue stripes along the body
- males with the dorsal fin raised into a tall flag during display
- in loose groups just above rubble, feeding into the current
- up to 9 cm

For about a second before sunset, this fish becomes something else.

Male flasher wrasses display at dusk, and the display is exactly what the name says: the fish accelerates upward, throws every fin open, and floods its body with color - reds, blues and violets far more intense than anything it wears the rest of the day - holds it for a fraction of a second, and switches it off. Then it does it again. A male in season will flash dozens of times in a few minutes, at every female in range, and the whole performance is over by dark.

The speed is the point. Color that intense is expensive and dangerous, because everything that hunts by sight can see it too, so the fish wears it only in bursts, in the last minutes of light, when the females are watching and the predators are changing shift.

Divers almost never see it, because it happens at the exact time everyone is back on the boat.

It lives in this sea and nowhere else, in loose groups over rubble slopes, picking plankton out of the current.

## Also known as

- **English:** eightline wrasse, Red Sea Eightline Flasher Wrasse, Red Sea Flasher Wrasse
- **Hebrew:** הדורנית תמן-קווית
- **Spanish:** Labrido intermitente del Mar Rojo de ocho líneas
- **Portuguese:** Bodião-do-paraíso-do-Mar-Vermelho
- **Czech:** pyskoun osmipásý
- **Chinese:** 八線副唇魚

## Range

Red Sea

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/wrasse/eight-striped-flasher-wrasse)*
*Updated: August 19, 2026*