Two black bars on a yellow head, the eastern Pacific porkfish, in groups around rock.
To about 38 cm, though the two standard sources give 31 and 38. Deep, compressed and high-backed with a small low mouth and thick lips. Golden-yellow with about six dark-edged blue stripes along the flank and a pair of blackish bars at the front, one through the eye and one immediately behind the head.
Juveniles differ: a yellow head and upper front body, a dark brown midlateral stripe and a large black spot at the tail base.
The blue-and-gold snapper is the fish to rule out and the two head bars do it. The long-fin grunt, also here, is plain silver-grey and unstriped.
Five to twenty-five metres on inshore rock, near the bottom, in small aggregations. It is described as not particularly common. It takes shrimps, crabs, snails, bivalves, worms and cephalopods off the bottom, and pairs when breeding. Its Atlantic counterpart has cleaner juveniles; whether these do is not recorded, and this entry does not assume it.
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.