[5] The background colour of the head and body is dark reddish brown to grey, but it is densely speckled with tiny white spots, these sometimes merge to form a network pattern in larger individuals, the outer part of the pectoral fin is yellowish.

[4] The speckled hind is found in the western Atlantic Ocean where it occurs around Bermuda as well as on the eastern coast of the United States where it is found as far north as North Carolina extending south to the Florida Keys and into the Gulf of Mexico as far east as Louisiana, it also occurs off the Yucatan Peninsula.

[1] The speckled hind was first formally described as Epinephelus drummondhayi by the American ichthyologists George Brown Goode (1851-1896) and Tarleton Hoffman Bean (1846-1916) in 1878 with the type locality given as Pensacola in Florida.

[2] The specific name honours the Scottish officer in the British Army and ornithologist, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Drummond-Hay (1814-1896), originally of Perth, Scotland, who discovered the species on Bermuda.

There is a bag limit for both commercial and recreational fisheries in the United States is one fish per vessel per trip.