It stopped looking like a wrasse. Wrasses are deep-bodied fish that row along with their pectoral fins, and this one is half a meter of cylinder with the head drawn out to a point - a shape that costs it the family's maneuverability and buys the ability to lie among seagrass blades at their exact angle and read as one of them.
The color is adjustable on top of that. The same individual can be brown, olive, mottled or bright yellow, shifting to match the bed it is sitting in, and a yellow fish in yellowing grass is invisible until it moves.
It hunts small crustaceans, molluscs and fish with a quick strike from a body that was, a second earlier, doing nothing at all.
Look in seagrass rather than on coral. Large individuals in some regions carry ciguatoxins, so the flag on this card is about eating it, not about meeting it.
The genus. Cheilio Lacepède 1802 - cheilos (lip). ETYFish
The species. Cheilio inermis (Forsskål 1775) - unarmed. ETYFish
- extremely elongated cigar-shaped body with a pointed snout
- color from brown-green to bright yellow, changeable
- hangs motionless among seagrass blades, aligned with them
- length up to 50 cm
