Malacanthus plumieri has a highly elongated, slightly compressed body with a slender, rounded head.

The caudal fin is lunate and is mainly yellow in colour with a dark blotch on the lower part of the upper lobe.

It ranges from Cape Lookout in North Carolina and Bermuda in the north southwards along the coast of the United States to the Bahamas, into the Gulf of Mexico where it has been recorded from the Florida Keys, along the shoreline of the Florida panhandle as far as eastern Louisiana, the Flower Garden Banks and the surrounding area, it also occurs from Tuxpan and along the Yucatan Peninsula and around Cuba.

Here it creates mounds of rubble or shell fragments in the vicinity of reefs and beds of sea grass.

They feed mainly on stomatopods, fishes, polychaetes, chitons, sea urchins, starfish, amphipods and decapods, especially shrimp.

[6] When George's Cuvier created the genus Malacanthus he named Bloch's Coryphaena plumieri as its type species.