A wide-ranging chub with faint brassy stripes, grazing shallow rock and often mixed with other chubs.
To about 70 cm, though one source gives 90; common at 50. Oval and compressed, silvery with a bluish sheen and twenty-three to twenty-nine gold to brassy horizontal lines, those above the lateral line following its curve, plus a gold streak under the eye.
The Cortez chub is the pair and those brassy stripes are the character: this fish has them and that one has only faint striping between the scale rows, plus a snout that drops abruptly before the eyes.
Nought to forty metres over algae-covered hard bottom, in schools, grazing attached algae. Juveniles associate with drifting weed offshore.
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.