Black with yellow-rimmed scales and a yellow bar at the pectoral fin base. Adults move in pairs and stay together for years.
To about 41 cm. The adult is dark grey to black with every scale rimmed bright yellow, black fins, and a yellow base to the pectoral fin. The juvenile is black with yellow bars, and this is the classic Caribbean identification problem.
The character is the tail. A juvenile french angelfish has a rounded tail with a continuous yellow margin all the way round. A juvenile grey angelfish has a squared-off tail, yellow at the base, black in the centre and clear at the rear edge. If the tail is ambiguous, look at the forehead line: an inverted Y in the french, branching down the sides of the mouth, against an inverted cross in the grey that runs down across the mouth to the chin, so the grey has yellow on the lips and the french does not. In adults, the yellow scale rims and yellow pectoral base are the french; the grey is uniform grey-brown with pale scale edges and a white chin.
Three to a hundred metres on shallow reef, often near sea fans, with juveniles in seagrass. Pairs are monogamous and apparently permanent, staying together until one dies, and they defend a territory recorded at up to five thousand square metres against neighbouring pairs, chasing and charging.
Juveniles run cleaning stations and service jacks, snappers, morays, grunts, surgeonfish, wrasses and green turtles, fluttering the body and touching the client with the pelvic fins. The adult produces a knocking sound when alarmed, which is the best-documented angelfish sound on this site.
It eats sponges.
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.