The two feelers under its chin are the whole design. They are barbels, they carry a dense field of taste buds and chemical sensors, and the fish drives them into sand to find animals it cannot see: worms, small crustaceans, brittle stars, whatever is buried in the top few centimeters. When it has finished it folds them back into a groove under the chin and they disappear, which is why a goatfish hanging in midwater looks like an ordinary fish.
This species does its digging at night. By day it does the opposite of hunting: dense, motionless schools hanging over the reef, sometimes hundreds of fish, going nowhere.
Those schools are often mixed. Yellowfin goatfish shoal with blue-striped snapper, and in a mixed group the goatfish shifts to a yellower cast that matches the snappers around it, so a predator scanning the school for the one fish that looks different finds nothing to settle on.
Red-orange along the back, white below, a yellow stripe down the side and yellow fins, up to thirty-eight centimeters.
The genus. Mulloidichthys Whitley 1929 - ichthys (fish). ETYFish
- a pair of barbels under the chin, folded into a groove when not in use
- yellow stripe along the side and yellow fins
- red-orange back, white belly
- dense motionless daytime schools, often mixed with blue-striped snapper
- up to 38 cm
