Marked with oblique pale bars over a dark body and a strongly notched tail. Often at a cleaning station with its mouth held open.
To about a metre, common at 40. Reddish to red-brown, densely covered in red-brown to dark brown spots, with nine to eleven narrow whitish to greenish bars over the nape and upper body that slope downward and forward. The mouth lining is red-orange to yellow-orange. Juveniles are a different fish entirely: bright yellow with a dark stripe from the snout through the eye along the side.
The yellowfin grouper has no bars and has an abruptly yellow outer third to the pectoral fin. The forward-sloping pale bars settle it.
Spawning males take a pale yellow or bronze head with black pectoral fins and a white spot at the base of the anal fin; spawning females keep normal colour with bright orange pectorals and the same white spot.
It is an ambush predator and sits still among coral and sponges, usually letting a diver approach. It uses cleaning stations regularly, and at them it turns a distinctive red and flares its gills and mouth, which is worth watching for. It forms spawning aggregations of tens to hundreds before full moons, between about nine at night and three in the morning.
Three to a hundred and thirty-five metres. Females are under 37 cm and males over 45. Ciguatera is reported. The two databases disagree on its conservation status, Data Deficient against Least Concern.
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.
