A heavy tuna with a short body and visible conical teeth, hunting alone or in small groups over Maldivian drop-offs.
To about 250 cm and 130 kg. Elongate and moderately compressed with a slender tail base, brilliant blue-black to blue-green above, silvery on the sides and whitish below. The practical field mark is two white tips on the second dorsal and anal fins near the tail base. The lateral line is strongly undulating, the teeth are large and conical, and it habitually swims with the jaws open.
No source consulted gives a clean separating character from the other Indo-Pacific tunas, so this entry does not offer one. The white fin tips and the deeply undulating lateral line are what the descriptions give.
Nought to two hundred and fifty metres, and unlike the true tunas it stays with structure: deep reef drop-offs, seamounts and steep walls, with smaller fish shallower. Usually alone or in groups of six or fewer. It is an apex reef predator on small schooling fish and squid.
Large individuals may be ciguatoxic.
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.