Almost black with a deep body and a bright red mouth lining, hanging in caves and wrecks on Red Sea reef.
To about 60 cm. The shape is the identification: deep-bodied and strongly compressed side to side, quite unlike the rounded profile of the other groupers, so it reads as a black silhouette in a cave mouth. Dark brown to black, sometimes with an orange cast, usually with a pale vertical bar on the side of the belly. The inside of the mouth, the gill cavity and the upper jaw membranes are bright reddish-orange, which shows whenever it yawns or feeds.
Juveniles have a broad white rear margin on the tail and mimic the pygmy angelfish until they outgrow the model.
One to sixty metres on coastal reefs and lagoons, often silty, always near caves and holes. It lives in the same cave, overhang or wreck for years, and the flat body lets it work into cracks other groupers cannot enter, where it hunts glassfish and cardinalfish. It approaches divers closely, sometimes uncomfortably so.
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.
