---
title: Parrotfishes (Scaridae)
scientific_name: Scaridae
common_name: Parrotfishes
rank: Family
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:43:02.809Z
tags: Parrotfishes, Scaridae, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes
---

# Parrotfishes (*Scaridae*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Family
- **Scientific name:** Scaridae
- **Body shape:** Oval - Egg-shaped body, deeper than it is thick - damselfishes, surgeonfishes.
- **Species listed here:** 18

## How to recognise this group

- robust, medium to large-sized body
- prominent, fused parrot-like beak
- characteristic scraping of reef surfaces

A reef is being taken apart at close to the rate it is being built, and parrotfish do most of the taking apart. Coral lays limestone down. Parrotfish bite it off again, all day, every day, and the difference between those two rates is whether a reef gains height, holds level, or slowly loses it. Nothing else on the reef removes rock on that scale.

The family does the job in three different ways, and the difference is the depth of the bite. Excavators, the heavy blunt-headed species, close the jaws at close to a right angle and take a real bite out of the substrate, leaving craters in dead limestone and sometimes in living heads. Scrapers, which covers most of the species a diver meets here, work at a shallower angle and lift the surface off without breaking far into it. Browsers barely touch stone at all, cropping fleshy weed and seagrass leaves and leaving the mineral part behind. Three fish that look like the same animal in different colors are running three separate quarries.

The rock does not leave the reef. Ground fine and passed as sediment, some of it ends up on the beach and some of it settles into the cavities inside the reef framework, where infill and cement are part of what turns a loose stack of coral skeletons into solid rock. What the bite leaves behind matters as much: bare, clean, grazed limestone is the kind of ground a coral larva can settle on.

Eighteen species are listed here. Reef scientists keep the whole thing as a budget, carbonate added against carbonate removed, and the excavators sit on both sides of it at once, which is why the answer is never obvious and why the biggest parrotfish, the slow ones that are easiest to fish out, matter more than their numbers suggest.


## Species (18)

- [Bicolor Parrotfish (Cetoscarus bicolor)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/bicolor-parrotfish)
- [Blue-barred Parrotfish (Scarus ghobban)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/blue-barred-parrotfish)
- [Bridled Parrotfish (Scarus frenatus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/bridled-parrotfish)
- [Bullethead Parrotfish (Chlorurus sordidus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/bullethead-parrotfish)
- [Candelamoa Parrotfish (Hipposcarus harid)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/candelamoa-parrotfish)
- [Common Parrotfish (Scarus psittacus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/common-parrotfish)
- [Dusky Parrotfish (Scarus niger)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/dusky-parrotfish)
- [Ember Parrotfish (Scarus rubroviolaceus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/ember-parrotfish)
- [Fivesaddle Parrotfish (Scarus scaber)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/fivesaddle-parrotfish)
- [Green Humphead Parrotfish (Bolbometopon muricatum)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/green-humphead-parrotfish)
- [Heavybeak Parrotfish (Chlorurus gibbus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/heavybeak-parrotfish)
- [Malindi Parrotfish (Scarus viridifucatus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/malindi-parrotfish)
- [Marbled Parrotfish (Leptoscarus vaigiensis)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/marbled-parrotfish)
- [Purple-brown Parrotfish (Scarus fuscopurpureus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/purple-brown-parrotfish)
- [Purplestreak Parrotfish (Chlorurus genazonatus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/purplestreak-parrotfish)
- [Red Sea Parrotfish (Scarus collana)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/red-sea-parrotfish)
- [Rusty Parrotfish (Scarus ferrugineus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/rusty-parrotfish)
- [Viridescent Parrotfish (Calotomus viridescens)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/viridescent-parrotfish)

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*