---
title: Exquisite Butterflyfish (Chaetodon austriacus)
scientific_name: Chaetodon austriacus
common_name: Exquisite Butterflyfish
taxon: Butterflyfishes
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-10-27T23:53:56.859Z
updated: 2026-08-29T00:18:26.830Z
tags: Exquisite Butterflyfish, Chaetodon austriacus, Butterflyfishes, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/butterflyfishes/exquisite-butterflyfish
---

# Exquisite Butterflyfish (*Chaetodon austriacus*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Butterflyfishes (*Chaetodontidae*)
- **Size:** up to 14 cm
- **Depth:** 1-15 m
- **Diet:** Corallivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Common
- **Habitat:** shallow coral-rich reef flats and slopes
- **Reproduction:** Broadcast spawner, Gonochoric
- **Endemic:** Endemic to the Red Sea
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- orange-yellow body with about fourteen fine dark stripes
- black tail and black anal fin, both rimmed with yellow
- dark band through the eye, black chin and lips
- always over living stony coral, nearly always in a pair
- up to 14 cm

This fish eats coral and nothing else, and it eats it a few polyps at a time. It takes bite after bite, many of them in a few minutes, keeps it up through the daylight hours, and spreads the work across many colonies so that no single coral head is stripped. A morning of this fish's feeding is several thousand small wounds on the reef, none of them fatal.

That diet is a trap. A strict coral feeder cannot be switched to anything else, which is why these fish die in aquariums no matter what is put in front of them, and why counts of them are used as a measure of reef condition. Where the coral goes, they go, and they go fast.

They are also picky within their one food. In the northern Red Sea they take mainly Acropora, Pocillopora, Montipora and Stylophora, prefer big colonies to small ones, and avoid heads that already have coral gobies living in the branches. Those little gobies carry a bitter toxin in their skin, and a butterflyfish that has once bitten into a branch with one in it does not come back.

The body is orange-yellow with about fourteen fine dark stripes, a dark band across the head and through the eye, a black chin, and a black tail and anal fin that are both rimmed in bright yellow. That rim matters: the Arabian butterflyfish of the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf has the same shape and the same black fins, but without the yellow edge.

This species belongs to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden and is found nowhere else in the world. It lives shallow, mostly in the top 15 m, in pairs that hold a feeding territory and stay together year-round, and it releases its eggs into open water at dusk with no further care.

## Also known as

- **English:** blacktail butterflyfish, Red Sea Melon Butterflyfish, exquisite butterflyfish
- **Arabic:** Moscht
- **Hebrew:** פרפרון שחור-שת
- **French:** Poisson-papillon côtelé de la mer Rouge
- **Italian:** Pesce farfalla ovale del Mar Rosso, Pesce farfalla coda nera, Pesce farfalla ovale occidentale
- **German:** Polypen-Falterfisch, Rotmeer-Rippenfalterfisch
- **Spanish:** Pez Mariposa de Cola Negra
- **Portuguese:** Peixe-borboleta-oval-do-Mar-Vermelho
- **Dutch:** Zwartstaartkoraalvlinder
- **Czech:** klipka rudomořská
- **Russian:** Чернохвостая бабочка-щёголь
- **CA:** Peix papallona de cua negra
- **DA:** Sorthalet fanefisk

## Scientific synonyms

- *Chaetodon klunzingeri* Kossman & Räuber, 1877
- *Chaetodon trifasciatus austriacus* Rüppell, 1836
- *Chaetodon trifasciatus klunzingeri* Kossman & Räuber, 1877
- *Citharoedus austriacus* (Rüppell, 1836)
- *Mesochaetodon corallochaetodon austriacus* (Rüppell, 1836)

## Range

Eritrea, Federal Republic of Somalia, Red Sea

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/butterflyfishes/exquisite-butterflyfish)*
*Updated: August 29, 2026*