Appearance
The African striped grunt has an elongated body. It has a large eye and a large, oblique mouth with an obvious chin and a short snout. It has a continuous dorsal fin which contains 13 spines and 14-15 soft rays while the anal fin has 3 spines and 7 soft rays. It appears black underwater but in fact the upper body is brownish, while the lower body has a silvery appearance. It has four white, horizontal stripes along each flank, two of these running through the black eyes. The fins are yellow in colour, with the caudal fin being more vivid than the others. The maximum standard length of this species is 50 cm, although a more typical standard length is 25 cm.Distribution
The African striped grunt is found in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. It ranges along the western coast of Africa from Angola in the south north to Morocco, including the islands in the Gulf of Guinea and the Macaronesian Islands and the southern Iberian Peninsula, into the southern Mediterranean as far as east as Tunisia. Vagrancy has occurred in the Bay of Biscay off the western coast of France.Habitat
The African striped grunt occurs at depths between 2 and 180 m. It is found over sandy and rocky substrates where it feeds on crustaceans and molluscs. The males and females form distinct pairs for spawning. The juveniles move inshore to take up territories.References:
Some text fragments are auto parsed from Wikipedia.
