Blue-green with bright blue and green bands around the mouth. It sleeps inside a mucus cocoon it secretes each night, which masks its scent from predators.
To 61 cm, commonly 32. Initial-phase females are dark grey with a broad white stripe running along the body just below the middle, which makes them the easiest initial-phase parrotfish in the Caribbean to name. Terminal-phase males are brilliant blue-green with bold pink to orange bands running from the snout around the mouth and back below the eye, and dusky margins to the upper pectoral fin and to the top and bottom of the tail. Large males grow long crescent tail lobes.
The stoplight parrotfish is the confusion in terminal phase, and it has a bright yellow crescent at the base of the tail and a yellow spot at the top corner of the gill cover. This species has neither, and has the pink facial banding instead.
It sleeps in a mucus cocoon. At night it secretes a transparent envelope from glands near the gill cover that encloses the whole fish, and this is thought to hide its scent from moray eels and to deter parasites. It is territorial, holds a harem, scrapes algae and rock from dead coral between 3 and 25 m, and is a significant producer of reef sand.
Its species name is shared with the queen triggerfish, which is on this site as well. The two are unrelated.
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.