Every grouper you see above a certain size is male, and every one of them used to be female.
Groupers are protogynous. A fish matures as a female, spawns as a female for several years, and then, if it grows large enough and the social situation calls for it, rebuilds its gonads and becomes male for the rest of its life. There is no separate male line: males are made out of the oldest and biggest females in the population.
That arrangement collapses under fishing pressure in a way that is easy to miss. Fishing takes the largest fish first, and in a grouper population the largest fish are the males. Remove them faster than females can convert and the population runs short of males, so spawning drops even while there are still plenty of fish on the reef. The stock looks healthy right up until it does not reproduce. It is one of the main reasons groupers collapse faster than their numbers suggest they should.
This one is a slimmer, mid-sized species, white with rounded orange-yellow spots packed over the whole body and a narrow white edge to the tail. It works sand and rubble at the edges of the reef rather than the coral itself.
The genus. Epinephelus Bloch 1793 - epinéphelos (ancient Greek for clouded over). ETYFish
The species. Epinephelus areolatus (Forsskål 1775) - with areolae. ETYFish
- white body covered in rounded orange-yellow polygonal spots
- narrow white margin along the rear edge of the tail
- slimmer than most groupers of the same length
- up to 47 cm
