A deep-bodied silver jack with a very large eye and a yellow tail, in tight schools over the reef edge.
To about a metre, typically under 60 cm. The eye is conspicuously large with a well-developed fatty eyelid, which is what the name refers to and the first thing to notice. Silvery, with the soft dorsal lobe tipped black, the rear scutes dark to black and a yellow tail. Juveniles carry about five dark bars that fade.
Two separations, one character each. Against the crevalle jack, look at the chest: fully scaled here, naked there apart from a small patch in front of the pelvic fins, and at range use the crevalle’s large round black blotch on the lower front pectoral rays, which this fish does not have. Against the bar jack, there is no black-and-blue stripe running into the lower tail lobe.
Nought to a hundred and forty metres, usually the top twenty, on offshore reefs and over soft and seagrass bottoms; juveniles on sandy beaches and mud. It enters brackish water and runs up rivers.
Accounts of how it treats divers conflict. One says it often approaches, another that it moves slowly away, and a third that schools crowd divers, apparently drawn to exhaled bubbles. It is a significant ciguatera carrier.
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.