A slim spotted mackerel that comes past fast and in numbers, hunting bait balls in Galapagos open water.
To about a metre. Elongate and strongly compressed, bronze-green to greenish-blue above and silvery below, with three to eight rows of small round orange spots along the sides. The mark that carries at range is the first dorsal fin: black on the outer half and whitish inside it. There are seven to ten small separate finlets behind the second dorsal and anal fins.
The wahoo is the confusion at a glance and the pattern settles it: vertical cobalt bars there, round spots here, and a much longer snout there.
Nought to sixty metres, schooling in the water column in coastal seas. It feeds on anchovies and other small schooling fish.
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.