A tall silver fish with sickle-shaped fins, over sand flats and around wrecks. Hard to approach and one of the more prized sights on a Florida wreck.
To about 122 cm, though one source gives 149. Short, deep and compressed with similar upper and lower profiles and a blunt snout. Silvery to iridescent blue above, sometimes with a dark oval blotch on the mid-side; large fish have blackish pectoral, anal and tail fins and an orange-yellow patch on the belly in front of the anal fin.
Two structural characters separate every Trachinotus from every Caranx at a glance: no scutes along the lateral line and no finlets. Against the palometa, this fish’s dorsal and anal lobes are only moderately long where the palometa’s trail well back.
Nought to eighty metres, in channels and holes over sand flats, on reef and occasionally mud. Adults are solitary or in small groups; juveniles school in the beach surf and are changeable black to silver with an orange blotch at the base of the anal fin.
Florida regulates it closely and the rules differ by area. Outside the Special Permit Zone there is a slot of 11 to 22 inches fork length plus one fish over 22 inches, two per person, open all year. Inside the zone, south of 25°40’N, the minimum is 22 inches, one per person, and it is closed from 1 April to 31 July.
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.