A heavy marbled grouper to 120 cm (4 ft), lying on the bottom beside a coral head and unwilling to move for a diver until the last moment. Sits, ambushes, swallows whole - a mouth that opens into a volume rather than a bite.
Once a year it does the opposite of everything above. Fish leave their home reefs and travel, in some cases tens of kilometers, to a specific site at a specific moon phase, and gather there by the hundred to spawn. The same corners of the same reefs are used year after year, for generations.
That predictability is the whole conservation problem. A fishery that finds an aggregation can take the breeding stock of an entire region in a few nights, and aggregations that have been fished out do not re-form. The species is Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List for exactly this reason, and where big groupers are still routine, someone is protecting a site.
It starts female and turns male with size, so the largest fish are the males - which means removing the big ones removes the breeders twice over. Large individuals have caused ciguatera poisoning in some regions; the flag on this card is about the table rather than about the reef.
The genus. Epinephelus Bloch 1793 - epinéphelos (ancient Greek for clouded over). ETYFish
The species. Epinephelus fuscoguttatus (Forsskål 1775) - fuscus (dark or dusky) + guttatus (spotted). ETYFish
- brown marbling in irregular blotches over a pale body
- dark saddle on the tail base
- head noticeably small for the depth of the body
- usually motionless on the bottom, not hovering
- length up to 120 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
