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.
The genus. Plagiotremus Gill 1865 - plagio- (oblique) + trema (hole). ETYFish
The species. Plagiotremus tapeinosoma (Bleeker 1857) - tapeinos (low or humble) + soma (body). ETYFish
- 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
Why it's threatened
There are no known major threats.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
