Below thirty meters the wrasse fauna changes over, and most divers never notice because they have turned around by then.
The shallow reef here carries the bright, fast, conspicuous wrasses: bird wrasse, flashers, the striped Halichoeres working rubble. Go down the slope and those thin out and a different set takes over - slimmer, paler, plainer fish that hold position over rubble in dim light and are not competing with anything above them. This is one of them, recorded from eleven meters down to ninety and genuinely common in the band where recreational diving stops.
That band matters more than its photographs suggest. It is cooler than the reef top, it bleaches less, it is fished less, and it holds populations of species that also live shallow. Whether it can reseed the reef above it after a bad summer is an open and important question.
The fish itself is unremarkable to look at: pale, slender, with a dark stripe running back from the snout. Which is roughly why nobody has photographed it here.
The genus. Oxycheilinus Gill 1862 - oxy (sharp). ETYFish
The species. Oxycheilinus arenatus (Valenciennes 1840) - sanded. ETYFish
- slender pale wrasse with a dark stripe from the snout along the body
- pointed head and a slightly forked tail
- on deep slopes rather than reef top
- up to 21 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no major threats known to this species, although it is caught in seine-nets and fish traps (Gell and Whittington 2002).
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
