Adults are green-blue with pink lines across the face and a dark bar behind the head; juveniles are orange-red with black-edged white saddles. They look nothing alike, and the young fish was long taken for a different species - a running theme in the wrasses, where a single animal can pass through three complete color schemes on the way up.
It disappears into the ground. Alarmed, the fish dives head-first into open sand and is gone in a second, and it does the same thing every night, burying itself to sleep with only the sand disturbed above it. That habit means a wrasse-rich reef looks empty at dusk.
Hunting is done by turning things over. It flips small rocks and rubble with its jaws to get at crabs, worms, brittle stars and molluscs, and crushes them with plates in the throat; other fish follow it for what the digging exposes.
All of them start as females. The largest become males, keep a territory with several females, and are the brightest fish in the group - so the most photogenic individual on the reef is always the oldest one there.
The genus. Coris Lacepède 1801 - korys (helmet). ETYFish
- adults green-blue with a dark bar behind the head and pink lines on the face
- juveniles orange-red with white saddles edged in black - a different-looking fish
- dives head-first into sand and vanishes when alarmed
- length up to 38 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
