Grouper

To borrow the sermonizing old dictum about children being seen and not heard, groupers (Epinephelinae) should perhaps be eaten and not seen. Looming around the world’s rocky and coral reefs, their bodies are misshapen lumps. The head is indistinct. Out of lateral bulges, cold eyes stare out. So wide are the jaws that they might be the animal’s whole raison d’être. A grouper’s mouth is like a cauldron: with its triple row of spear-like teeth, it could stand in for the gates of hell. More dental plates line the pharynx. As groupers tend to swallow their prey whole, they like to ensure it gets nicely crushed on its way down.

To complete the tableau, we must mention size. This tends to vary across the 160 or so grouper species – as do the colours, which range from brightest red to dullest grey, via every manner of stripe and speckle. But groupers are rarely less than chunky fish. The Atlantic goliath (Epinephelus itajara) can grow to 2.5 metres. The black grouper (Mycteroperca bonaci), whose habitat extends from the Caribbean to southern Brazil, rocks up in second place, with 2.3 metres. The giant – or “Queensland” – grouper of the Indo-Pacific (Epinephelus lanceolatus) comes in at 1.8 metres. And so it goes, down to species that we might more readily imagine handling in the kitchen.

Behaviour-wise, groupers are protogynous hermaphrodites: they start out as females and, over the course of their lives, change to male. This process remains a little mysterious. But we know it tends to be socially mediated, in that a female will transition to male when males are underrepresented within a certain area. This, one might argue, sets new standards for the pursuit of gender parity. Then again, a male grouper will have a harem of females at his disposal – so perhaps it’s to do with patriarchal self-interest after all.

If groupers fail the “cute animal” test by a sea mile, they do – true to nature’s occasionally perverse compensation games – make up for it in taste. Their flesh is sweet, low in fat and thalassic in a genteel kind of way, all with a moist, flaky texture. Or could it be that groupers’ unsightliness evolved as a protective feature, a decoy for their succulence? If so, it didn’t work – at least, not with humans. Many grouper species are overfished. The goliath is critically endangered: at the time of writing, it was still protected in the United States of America and the Caribbean by moratoriums brought in 30 years ago.