Five black bars on silver, in the top few metres, in numbers.
To about 20 cm, silver-white with a yellow-green back and five black vertical bars. The similar Abudefduf sexfasciatus has six bars and black bands along the tail lobes; A. bengalensis lacks the yellow. All three occur here and mixed schools are normal.
It occupies the top few metres over reef flats, jetties and rocky shallows in schools of dozens to hundreds, feeding on plankton, algae and almost anything else available. Males turn blue-grey and defend purple egg patches laid on hard surfaces — pilings, hulls and rock — driving off much larger fish and, readily, divers. It is a common fish on the shallow parts of muck sites and on safety stops. Recorded from the surface to about 15 m.
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.