A small silver schooling fish with dark lines along the flank, in tight numbers over Galapagos rock.
To about 30 cm. Slender and elongate for a grunt, with a conical head, a large eye, a short oblique mouth and a projecting lower jaw. Dark silvery-grey above with green or blue-green tints, silvery-white below, and about seven black horizontal stripes along the flank, closer together towards the back.
No source consulted names a species it can be confused with, and this entry does not invent one.
Nought to twenty metres along rocky shore, on walls and over steep slopes, in the water column. It is a plankton feeder taking zooplankton, fish larvae and small fish, and what a diver notices is the density: Reef Life Survey records a mean of over four thousand individuals per transect where it occurs, at about a fifth of Galapagos sites.
A Galapagos endemic and listed as Vulnerable, which makes it the only threatened fish in this group on the site. Note for anyone searching the literature: it was Xenocys jessiae until the genus moved, and FishBase and Reef Life Survey still file it under that name.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.