White with a yellow stripe and a yellow tail, resting in stationary schools above sand by day and feeding singly at night.
To about 45 cm, common at 28. Pale tan with a single yellow stripe from the eye to the tail and a yellow tail. It is the only goatfish in the region with one yellow stripe, which is the whole separation from the spotted goatfish’s three dark blotches.
Nought to about fifty metres, usually the top thirty-five, on reef and adjacent sand. It forms large near-stationary daytime schools hanging over the reef and disperses at dusk to probe sand with the barbels.
The detail worth noticing is the company it keeps: it schools with smallmouth grunt, an association treated in the literature as social protective mimicry. A mixed shoal of yellow-striped fish over a Caribbean reef is often both species.
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.