Yellow lines over a white body, in dense stationary schools under ledges by day. It grinds its pharyngeal teeth audibly, which is what a grunt is named for.
To about 30 cm. About twelve yellow stripes on a pale ground, the lower ones running obliquely rather than horizontally, and yellow fins throughout including the tail. The structural character, if you have the fish in hand, is that the scales below the front of the lateral line are twice the size of those above it.
The white grunt reverses that scale relationship exactly, and in the water the useful version is that this fish’s stripes run the full length of the body where the white grunt’s stop at the head. Against the bluestriped grunt, the tail is yellow here and dark there.
Juveniles carry three brown stripes, and the one from the snout through the eye ends in a double brown spot at the tail base. That double spot is what separates a juvenile french grunt from a juvenile white grunt, which has four stripes and a single round spot.
Nought to about sixty metres over reef, seagrass and soft bottom. This is the classic large stationary daytime school under a ledge or beside elkhorn coral. At dusk it disperses over sand and seagrass to feed on small crustaceans and returns at dawn, and the migration routes are learned: juveniles acquire them over the same corals used by earlier cohorts, which was documented in 1982.
Unregulated in Florida. 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.