Notoclinops segmentatus
A 2cm fish with electric blue eye-rings, most reliably found on North Island, New Zealand reef walls in cool 15-19.5C water.
At barely 2cm long, this is a fish you find by looking for the eyes first: a ring of iridescent blue circles each eye, which is what gives it away against plain rock. The body is slender, near-transparent to pale orange-brown, with faint reddish segment-like bars running along its sides, hence the scientific name segmentatus. It perches upright on its pectoral fins rather than swimming in open water, which is the classic triplefin giveaway once you clock the posture.
Look for it sitting motionless on rock faces and reef rubble, propped on its front fins rather than cruising, which is typical triplefin behaviour. It is territorial over a small patch of substrate and tends to stay put or dart a few centimetres rather than flee the reef entirely when divers approach. Most logs describe it as uncommon rather than common, so slow, close looking at bare rock and encrusted surfaces pays off more than scanning open water.
Triplefins get their name from having three separate dorsal fins rather than one continuous fin, a feature you can actually pick out on this species if you get close enough given its small size.
Sightings are recorded across the year with no clear seasonal spike, and the observed 15.1 to 19.5C temperature range matches the North Island's cool-temperate water year-round, so there is no single best month to plan around.
Reef neighbours a diver could mistake it for. Use the identification notes above to tell them apart.
This one is a North Island, New Zealand specialty, logged across dive sites there far more than anywhere else in the data. If you are diving temperate reef walls and rocky reef around the North Island, it is a realistic find, though a diver should expect to hunt for it rather than have it swim into view.
Mapping where Blue-eyed Triplefin is logged…
It is most reliably logged on North Island, New Zealand dive sites, particularly on rocky reef and reef wall habitat. Records outside New Zealand are effectively absent from current data.
There is no detected seasonal pattern, and it is found year-round in water between about 15 and 19.5C, so timing your trip around New Zealand's general dive season matters more than chasing a specific month.
Look for a tiny, 2cm fish perched on rock with rings of bright blue around its eyes and faint reddish bars along a pale, near-translucent body. It sits still on its pectoral fins rather than swimming freely, which is a classic triplefin trait.
They stay tiny, reaching only around 2cm in length, which makes them one of the smaller reef fish a diver is likely to try to spot in New Zealand waters.
No. It poses no threat to divers and will simply hold its position on the rock or dart a short distance away if approached.
Site and sighting data is aggregated from diver logs, iNaturalist and GBIF. For taxonomy and conservation status:
Klipfish
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