Two black bars on a yellow head with yellow and silver lines behind. Juveniles are black and yellow and clean other fish.
To about 40 cm. Deep, compressed and high-backed with a short blunt head and a small low mouth with fleshy lips. Yellow and silvery-blue stripes along the body, yellow fins, and two thick black bars at the front — one oblique through the eye and one vertical immediately behind the head. Nothing else in the Caribbean has that combination.
The juvenile is another matter and looks much like a juvenile french or white grunt: yellow head, upper front body and spiny dorsal, a black midlateral stripe, a second along the upper back and a large black spot at the tail base. The bright yellow head and only two dark stripes separate it from the three or four on a pale head that the Haemulon juveniles carry.
One to about a hundred metres over rock and coral and the soft bottom, seagrass and mangrove beside them. Small daytime aggregations, feeding at night on molluscs, echinoderms, worms and crustaceans. Juveniles are established cleaners, picking parasites off larger fish, which of all the grunts on this site is confirmed only for this one.
Unregulated in Florida.
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.