Reef behaviors › The shadow hunter

A change of colors

Trumpetfish come golden, brown, or silvery with a blue head, and choose escorts of their own color: golden fish shadow golden fish, blue ones blue. Prey react least when the colors match.

Species involved

trumpetfish Aulostomus maculatus

Where to see it in the game: Watch the trumpetfish after it leaves the coney.

Source: Matchette et al. 2025, Proc. R. Soc. B

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Spinyhead is a free game you play in your browser: you are a spinyhead blenny, a fish about 3 cm long living in a worm hole on a Caribbean coral head. Feed, fight for a better hole, court, raise eggs and dodge predators, while everything around you behaves the way field biologists have seen it behave. Most behaviors in the game come from published field studies; the rest are borrowed from other reefs or extrapolated, and this page says which. There are 82 on these pages, and more in the game’s field notebook waiting to be found.