A large Galapagos hogfish in wildly variable colour, from plain black to orange and white blotches.
To about 60 cm. Colour is no use at all: adults run uniformly dark grey or brown, through bright orange, to white blotched irregularly with black, and fewer than one in twenty is entirely black. Juveniles are pale yellow to white with three black stripes on the head and body and black-edged fins. Large males develop a bump on the forehead and an expanded chin.
The other large hogfish on the cool western Galapagos reefs is the Pacific red sheephead, and its terminal fish carry one large clean yellow-to-orange patch on the flank behind the head. The harlequin’s blotching is irregular and never forms a single tidy patch.
Five to forty-five metres on rock, and in the Galapagos usually on the cooler western islands, Isabela and Fernandina. It eats almost anything: worms, echinoderms, molluscs, crustaceans, fish and cephalopods. Females become males with size. Collected for aquariums.
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.