Queen Triggerfish in Cozumel

Blue-green above and yellow-orange below, with two bright blue stripes running across the snout and long trailing filaments off the top and bottom of the tail.

Quick ID

Where You Will See It In Cozumel

Queen Triggerfish is tagged on reef profiles right along the west coast, across a depth band of roughly 16 to 98 feet.

Deeper, and on the walls. It also shows up on Villa Blanca Wall.

Where else the habitat suits it. The depth and reef type also line up at Money Bar, Palancar Bricks, Palancar Caves, Palancar Gardens, Palancar Horseshoe and Paradise, though those are not sites where we have it logged.

Conditions change the odds more than the site does — the current, the time of day and how much the group has already stirred up the sand. Ask your guide what they have been seeing that week.

Behaviour

Feeds on sea urchins by blowing water to flip them onto their unarmoured underside. Locks itself into crevices with a trigger-like dorsal spine — the behaviour the family is named for.

Commonly Confused With

• Ocean triggerfish — Ocean triggerfish is plain grey and usually higher in the water column.
• Black durgon — Black durgon is uniformly dark with bright white lines at the fin bases.

Diving Etiquette And Safety

Triggerfish guarding a nest on the sand will defend it. If one rises to meet you, swim horizontally away rather than upward — the territory is a cone above the nest.

Part of the Cozumel marine life guide · see Cozumel dive sites · plan your Cozumel dive trip

Photo: Greg Grimes, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.