Bicolour Cleaner Wrasse

Common name for a species of coral reef-fish, with the scientific designation Labroides bicolor. These fish are best-known for living in a cleaning symbiosis with larger –often predatory– fish. They groom those larger fish and benefit from this by feeding on any parasites, mucus and dead skin tissue, that they remove from them. They typically stay in locations, known as cleaning stations, where other fish come to be cleaned. The anterior part of the adult Bicolour Cleaner Wrasse is mostly blackish-blue, while the anterior part of its body is mostly yellow, with some blackish margins around the fins and tail. Although there appears to be no obvious sexual dimorphism, the male is somewhat larger than the female and may exhibit a bluer head. This fish is believed to be a protogynous or monandric hermaphrodite, meaning that it starts life as a female, yet the dominant individual of a harem then changes into a male, thus undergoing a bi-directional sex-change. Males are larger then females. Juveniles are yellow with a black stripe. 回