Yellowfin Goatfish

Photo: Sylvain Le Bris · CC BY-NC

Dense schools of hundreds of individuals form resting aggregations on the sandy seabed around the wreck during daylight hours, their yellow tail stripes flashing in the ambient light. At night they disperse across the reef flat to probe the substrate with chemosensory barbels, extracting worms, small crustaceans, and buried invertebrates. The wreck acts as a daytime refuge that concentrates prey items in the surrounding sand, attracting the goatfish in numbers rarely seen on natural reef.