A small Red Sea grouper, red-brown at the front and paler behind, with blue spots on the head only.
To about 35 cm, common at 23, and recorded to twenty-six years. Reddish-brown to orange-brown with small dark-edged blue spots and a deep red dorsal fin. The reliable mark is the yellow margin on the pectoral fins.
The name says the spots are confined to the front half of the body, and most identification keys rest on that, but at least one Red Sea account describes the spots as covering most of the body. Use the yellow pectoral margins instead. The coral hind is the other spotted Red Sea hind: it is larger and spotted evenly over the whole body and tail, where this fish’s spotting does not carry cleanly onto the rear body and it has the yellow pectoral edges.
Four to fifty-five metres, usually fifteen to twenty, on scattered coral heads and open rock. It is evasive, keeping a coral head between itself and a diver and moving each time you move, which makes it harder to photograph than its abundance suggests.
Unusually for a grouper it is monogamous: a single pair holds a joint territory of about sixty square metres, rather than a male keeping a harem. It hunts by rushing from cover, and about two-thirds of its diet is fish, mostly damselfish.
Listed as Least Concern but with low resilience and high fishing vulnerability in unmanaged fisheries.
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.
