Yellow with four blue lines, and almost always in a stationary school.
To about 35 cm, bright yellow with four blue-white horizontal stripes edged in dark blue and a white belly that may carry faint grey lines. The similar Lutjanus quinquelineatus has five stripes and a black spot below the dorsal fin. Counting the lines is the identification, and it works even in a large school.
Schools of tens to several hundred hold above coral heads, wreck structure and slope edges through the day, facing into current and barely moving, and disperse at night to hunt fish and crustaceans over sand and rubble. A stationary school is one of the more forgiving subjects on a reef: it will tolerate a slow approach to within two or three metres and reforms behind a diver who passes through. Recorded from about 3 to 50 m.
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.