Pale with five dark bars, a black saddle on the tail base and a black band through the eye. Curious and easy to approach, which is part of why it has been fished to the point of being listed as critically endangered.
To about 1.2 m, pale with five dark bars down the body, a black saddle on top of the tail base and a dark band running through the eye. The saddle is the reliable character: it is always there whatever colour phase the fish is in, and the fish changes phase quickly between a barred pattern, a plain dark one and an almost white one.
It is critically endangered, and the reason is the same trait that makes it good to dive with. It gathers to spawn at the same few sites at the same few days each winter, in thousands, and it is curious and easy to approach. Both facts were used: whole aggregations were fished out in a season across much of the Caribbean. The Little Cayman aggregation is protected and monitored and is one of the few of any size left. Outside the spawning window it is a solitary fish on the reef, sitting on the bottom or hanging under a ledge, and it will often follow a diver at a distance.
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.
