---
title: Red Sea Bird Wrasse (Gomphosus klunzingeri)
scientific_name: Gomphosus klunzingeri
common_name: Red Sea Bird Wrasse
taxon: Wrasse
published: 2024-10-28T18:41:59.810Z
updated: 2026-08-20T07:30:33.293Z
tags: Red Sea Bird Wrasse, Gomphosus klunzingeri, Wrasse, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/wrasse/red-sea-bird-wrasse
---

# Red Sea Bird Wrasse (*Gomphosus klunzingeri*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Wrasse (*Labridae*)
- **Size:** 32 cm
- **Depth:** 1-35 m
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Common
- **Habitat:** Coral-rich reef, constantly on the move
- **Reproduction:** Protogynous hermaphrodite
- **Endemic:** Endemic to the Red Sea

## How to recognise it

- long curved beak-like snout, unmistakable in profile
- males dark blue-green, females and juveniles pale brown with a dark tail
- swims by rowing with the pectoral fins, never stops moving
- up to 32 cm

The snout is a pair of forceps, and it exists to reach into places the rest of the fish cannot go.

A coral head is full of food and almost all of it is inside: shrimp in the branches, worms in the crevices, small crustaceans down among the bases. A blunt-headed fish can see all of it and reach none of it. Draw the jaws out into a long thin curved beak and the animal can put its mouth twenty or thirty millimeters into a gap that its head could never enter, feel around, and take what is there.

That is why it never stops moving. A fish that feeds by probing has to visit a great many holes to make a living, and a bird wrasse works a reef the way a bird works a hedge, going over the whole thing at speed and never staying anywhere.

Male and female look like different animals - he is dark blue-green, she is pale brown with a dark tail - and the change from one to the other comes with the sex change that runs through this whole family.

It lives in this sea and nowhere else.

## Also known as

- **English:** Red Sea Bird Wrasse
- **Hebrew:** חדפון תכול
- **French:** Labre-oiseau de Mer Rouge
- **Italian:** Labride uccello del Mar Rosso, Labro uccello del Mar Rosso, Tordo uccello del Mar Rosso
- **Spanish:** Lábrido Nariz de Pájaro del Mar Rojo
- **Portuguese:** Bodião-passarinho-do-Mar-Vermelho

## Range

Red Sea

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/wrasse/red-sea-bird-wrasse)*
*Updated: August 20, 2026*