Due to their small size and cryptic behavior, cryptobenthic fishes are often overlooked. Since classic coral reef monitoring techniques such as SCUBA-based underwater visual transects do not adequately detect cryptobenthic coral reef fishes (Ackerman and Bellwood 2000), it is necessary to perform specific in situ techniques to collect fishes using anesthetics, like clove-oil (Ackerman and Bellwood 2002). This makes it possible to collect entire communities at small spatial scales, which makes cryptobenthic fishes a powerful model system for understanding coral reef community ecology (Wong and Buston 2013; Brandl et al. 2018). Specifically, cryptobenthics may offer a fruitful system to describe recently proposed fundamental ecological processes that drive community assembly and species diversity: selection, dispersal, drift, and speciation (Vellend 2016).