A small brown grouper with dark bars, and it tolerates silt that most groupers do not.
To about 30 cm, brown to olive with seven or eight darker vertical bars, a dark blotch behind the eye and a pale-edged tail. The bars can be displayed or suppressed. It is one of the smaller groupers here and is regularly overlooked.
It occupies silty inshore reef, rubble and jetty structure as readily as clean coral, which puts it on almost every muck site, and it holds a small territory around a specific piece of cover. It takes small fish and crustaceans. Like other Cephalopholis it sits on the substrate rather than swimming and is easily approached. Recorded from about 2 to 30 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.
