Pale with blue and yellow lines on the head only, and a bright orange mouth lining shown in the gaping display.
To about 53 cm. Silvery-white or cream with bronze and yellow tints. The dark blue and yellow stripes are on the head only and stop at the gill cover; the upper body instead carries vertical oval blue-and-yellow marks on the scale centres, which reads as a checkered pattern. The mouth lining is bright red. Scales above the lateral line are larger than those below, which is the reverse of the french grunt.
Juveniles have four black stripes and a round black spot at the tail base, against three stripes and a double spot on a juvenile french grunt. That is the whole separation and it is worth learning, because those two juveniles school together.
One to about a hundred and sixty metres, though most divers see it between the shoreline and twenty-four metres over patch reef, hard bottom and wrecks. Dense daytime aggregations, feeding at night on crustaceans, small molluscs and small fish. Juveniles school by size in shallow seagrass, shelter among the spines of long-spined urchins, and feed on copepods by day, which is the opposite of the adults.
The gaping display is worth watching for: two fish face each other and push mouth to mouth with the jaws wide open. It is not known whether that is courtship or a territorial display, and it is not how the grunt is made. The sound comes from grinding pharyngeal teeth, amplified by the swim bladder, which is a separate action that can happen at the same time.
Unregulated in Florida. Ciguatera is reported.
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.