The snout is a pair of forceps, and it exists to reach into places the rest of the fish cannot go.
A coral head is full of food and almost all of it is inside: shrimp in the branches, worms in the crevices, small crustaceans down among the bases. A blunt-headed fish can see all of it and reach none of it. Draw the jaws out into a long thin curved beak and the animal can put its mouth twenty or thirty millimeters into a gap that its head could never enter, feel around, and take what is there.
That is why it never stops moving. A fish that feeds by probing has to visit a great many holes to make a living, and a bird wrasse works a reef the way a bird works a hedge, going over the whole thing at speed and never staying anywhere.
Male and female look like different animals - he is dark blue-green, she is pale brown with a dark tail - and the change from one to the other comes with the sex change that runs through this whole family.
It lives in this sea and nowhere else.
The genus. Gomphosus Lacepède 1801 - gomphos (nail or pin). ETYFish
- long curved beak-like snout, unmistakable in profile
- males dark blue-green, females and juveniles pale brown with a dark tail
- swims by rowing with the pectoral fins, never stops moving
- up to 32 cm
