A large red coralgrouper with small blue spots, hunting in the open along Red Sea drop-offs rather than sitting on the bottom.
To about 90 cm in the Red Sea, or 120 on the wider figure. Elongate and robust, heavier through the body than a coral hind, brown to orange-red or grey-brown to deep red with pale bars, covered in small dark-edged blue spots, some of them vertically elongated, and a blue ring, often incomplete, round the eye.
The other coralgrouper here is the squaretail coralgrouper, and no clean separating character between the two was found in the sources, so this entry does not offer one.
The behaviour is why the fish matters. It recruits moray eels to hunt. It swims to a resting giant moray and shakes its head at three to six shakes a second until the moray comes out, then hunts open water while the moray works the crevices. Where prey has hidden in a hole the grouper cannot reach, it holds a headstand directly over the spot and shakes its head at the eel — a pointing gesture, and one of very few documented in any fish. It has also been recorded hunting with humphead wrasse and with the big blue octopus.
One to a hundred and forty-seven metres, on lagoon and seaward reefs. It is crepuscular and spends the day inside a cave or under an overhang.
The name is unsettled. The Red Sea fish is Plectropomus pessuliferus marisrubri; WoRMS treats it as a subspecies and other authorities treat it as a full species, Plectropomus marisrubri, endemic to the Red Sea. Genus-level caution on ciguatera applies: Plectropomus are standard vectors on Indo-Pacific reefs, though it is not confirmed for this fish specifically.
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.
