French Grunt

Photo: Jan Ebr & Ivana Ebrová · CC BY

French grunts school in dense aggregations of hundreds of fish above the coral heads at Les Arcadins during the day, dispersing at night to forage individually across the sand flats for polychaete worms and small crustaceans. Their abundance is a reliable proxy for reef health, as they occupy a critical trophic link between invertebrate prey and larger predators like snappers and groupers.