A large deep-water hogfish of the Galapagos, red when young and dark with one yellow flank patch as a terminal male.
To about 70 cm. Young and female fish are red with a white chin; terminal males are bluish-grey to blackish with one large yellow-to-orange patch on the flank behind the head, which is the mark to look for.
The harlequin wrasse is the other large hogfish here. Its blotching is irregular and variable and never forms a single clean flank patch.
Three to two hundred metres, so most of its range is below diving. It belongs to Peru, northern Chile and the Galapagos, and reaches Cocos Island only as a straggler, which is why the Cocos rating here is a five.
This entry replaced one that had the wrong fish on it. The page previously carried Bodianus tanyokidus under the name streamer hogfish; that species is Indo-West Pacific and has no eastern Pacific record at all, and “streamer hogfish” is in any case a trade name for the Mexican hogfish. The old URL redirects here.
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.