For about a second before sunset, this fish becomes something else.
Male flasher wrasses display at dusk, and the display is exactly what the name says: the fish accelerates upward, throws every fin open, and floods its body with color - reds, blues and violets far more intense than anything it wears the rest of the day - holds it for a fraction of a second, and switches it off. Then it does it again. A male in season will flash dozens of times in a few minutes, at every female in range, and the whole performance is over by dark.
The speed is the point. Color that intense is expensive and dangerous, because everything that hunts by sight can see it too, so the fish wears it only in bursts, in the last minutes of light, when the females are watching and the predators are changing shift.
Divers almost never see it, because it happens at the exact time everyone is back on the boat.
It lives in this sea and nowhere else, in loose groups over rubble slopes, picking plankton out of the current.
The species. Paracheilinus octotaenia Fourmanoir 1955 - octo- (eight) + taenia (band). ETYFish
- small slender wrasse with fine orange and blue stripes along the body
- males with the dorsal fin raised into a tall flag during display
- in loose groups just above rubble, feeding into the current
- up to 9 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no major threats known to this species.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
