Disturb it and it stops being a fish. It tips onto its side, stops swimming, and drifts with the water like a dead leaf going past, and it will keep doing it for as long as it takes. For a shy eleven-centimeter animal on open weedy bottom with no hole to run to, playing dead vegetation is a better option than a sprint it cannot win.
The sexes are easy once you know where to look, and it is not the body. The male carries three blue spots on the first dorsal fin, which is where the name comes from and which only shows when the fin is raised. The female has no spots at all: she has a clean white stripe running along the side instead. Two fish in the same patch of weed can look like two species until the male puts his fin up.
The rest of it is mottled olive-brown with fine white speckling, sitting in weed on rubble rather than cruising in the open like most wrasses.
It also lives in the Mediterranean, having gone north through Suez, and it spent years established there recorded under a different species' name - which is how an invasion happens invisibly, because nobody counts what nobody has correctly identified.
The genus. Pteragogus Peters 1855 - ptera- (fin) + agogos (leading). ETYFish
The species. Pteragogus trispilus Randall 2013 - tri- (three) + spilos (mark or spot). ETYFish
- males with three blue spots on the first dorsal fin
- females plain with a white stripe running along the side
- mottled olive-brown body with fine white speckling
- tips over and drifts like a dead leaf when disturbed
- up to 11 cm
