A small grouper in three colour forms — red, bicolour and bright yellow — all with two dark spots on the chin and two at the tail base.
To about 40 cm and eleven years. Whatever colour it is, four marks are constant: small pale-blue spots with dark edges all over the body, two small black spots on the upper tail base, and two black blotches at the tip of the lower jaw. Learn those and colour stops mattering.
Colour matters a great deal otherwise. There is a uniform red phase in deep water, an orange-brown phase at middle depths, and a bicolour phase in the shallows with a dark upper half and an abruptly pale lower half. A golden yellow form also occurs. The bicolour phase is an excitement response and it switches on and off in a few seconds.
The graysby is the confusion, and it has four spots in a row along the base of the dorsal fin which it flicks between black and white, where this fish has the two spots on the tail base instead.
One to a hundred and fifty metres, commonly around thirty-five, in clear water over coral and rock. It shelters in caves and under ledges by day and follows moray and snake eels to take what they flush out of the reef. Females become males at around 20 cm. Ciguatera is reported.
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.
