---
title: Sixline Wrasse (Pseudocheilinus hexataenia)
scientific_name: Pseudocheilinus hexataenia
common_name: Sixline Wrasse
taxon: Wrasse
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-10-28T14:17:53.873Z
updated: 2026-08-14T10:52:47.474Z
tags: Sixline Wrasse, Pseudocheilinus hexataenia, Wrasse, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/wrasse/sixline-wrasse
---

# Sixline Wrasse (*Pseudocheilinus hexataenia*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Wrasse (*Labridae*)
- **Size:** up to 10 cm
- **Depth:** 1-35 m
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Common
- **Habitat:** Branching coral heads, deep among the branches
- **Reproduction:** Broadcast spawner, Protogynous hermaphrodite
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- small purple-blue fish with six orange stripes running the length of the body
- green tail and a dark spot at its base
- always inside a coral head, moving constantly through the branches
- length up to 10 cm

Ten centimeters (4 in) of purple fish with six orange stripes, threading through the branches of a coral head at speed and never leaving it. Finding one is easy; photographing one is not.

It hunts the coral's own residents - tiny crustaceans, copepods, and the small parasites that plague reef fish - working the branches methodically all day. In an aquarium the same habit made it famous as the fish that eliminates pyramid snails and bristleworms.

It sleeps inside the coral too, and it does what many wrasses and parrotfish do: secretes a mucus envelope around itself for the night, which masks its scent from anything hunting by smell.

Each coral head holds one dominant fish, and the species is aggressive at its own scale - two males in one colony is not a stable arrangement. Like all wrasses it begins female, and the fish holding the head is one that changed.

## Also known as

- **English:** pyjama, Six-line Wrasse, sixstripe wrasse
- **French:** Labre pygmée à six lignes, Labre six-lignes
- **Italian:** Labro a sei linee
- **German:** Sechsstreifen-Lippfisch
- **Portuguese:** Bodião-de-seis-linhas
- **Czech:** pyskoun šestipruhý
- **Japanese:** ニセモチノウオ, Nisemochino-uo, Nisemochinouo
- **Chinese:** 六带拟唇鱼, 六帶擬唇魚, 六帶擬鸚鯛
- **Russian:** Краснополосый псевдохейлин
- **DA:** Sekslinjet læbefisk
- **DIV:** Hikaa
- **SMO:** Sugale-manifi, Sugale-tusitusi
- **TGL:** Mameng
- **TH:** ปลานกขุนทองเจ็ดเส้น

## Scientific synonyms

- *Cheilinus hexataenia* Bleeker, 1857
- *Cossyphus echis* Guichenot, 1869
- *Pseudocheilinus hexataenis* (Bleeker, 1857)
- *Pseudocheilinus Hexateania* (Bleeker, 1857)
- *Pseudocheilinus psittaculus* Kner & Steindachner, 1867
- *Pseudocheinilus Hexateania* (Bleeker, 1857)
- *Pseudolabrus hexataenia* (Bleeker, 1857)

## Range

Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Indian Ocean, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Red Sea, Republic of Mauritius, Seychelles, South Africa

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