Blue streak wrasses inhabit Indo-pacific coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef. Wrasses possess a smooth, compressed, elongate body with a pointed snout. They have small mouths with prominent lips. They have jaws and teeth, particularly 2 canines that are curved anteriorly in each jaw.
Wrasses have very small scales and the head is normally scaleless.
Blue streak wrasses are brilliant blue with a broad jet-black band that runs from the tip of the snout to the end of the tail, starting out narrow at the anterior end and gradually broadening towards the posterior end. Their diet consists primarily of parasitic copepods and other invertebrates that are taken from the mouth and gill openings of larger fish. They also feed occasionally on free-swimming crustaceans. Blue streak wrasses are known as common cleaner fish that set up cleaning stations on various parts of coral reefs, usually 3-10ft. deep. They attract larger fish to their stations by making strange, oscillatory swimming movements, and the fish then stop to get cleaned.