Juvenile fish
The eastern blue groper feeds mainly on crabs, shrimps, molluscs and echinoderms. Juvenile fish live in seagrass beds where their diet is primarily small crustaceans. This fish is a sequential hermaphrodite, starting life as a female and becoming a male when it has reached a length of at least . The fish become sexually mature at age two to three and breeding takes place between July and September. The larvae are planktonic at first and settle in seagrass beds.