---
title: Green Humphead Parrotfish (Bolbometopon muricatum)
scientific_name: Bolbometopon muricatum
common_name: Green Humphead Parrotfish
taxon: Parrotfishes
conservation_status: VU - Vulnerable
published: 2024-11-15T13:07:35.467Z
updated: 2026-08-12T11:28:54.658Z
tags: Green Humphead Parrotfish, Bolbometopon muricatum, Parrotfishes, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/green-humphead-parrotfish
---

# Green Humphead Parrotfish (*Bolbometopon muricatum*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Parrotfishes (*Scaridae*)
- **Size:** up to 1.3 m
- **Weight:** 75 Kg
- **Depth:** 1-40 m
- **Max age:** 40 yrs
- **Diet:** Corallivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Very Rare
- **Habitat:** Outer reef slopes and lagoons, sleeping in caves in groups
- **Reproduction:** Broadcast spawner, Protogynous hermaphrodite
- **Conservation status:** VU - Vulnerable

## How to recognise it

- huge blue-green fish with a vertical bony bulge on the forehead
- beak of fused teeth, often pale and visibly worn
- moves in schools of a dozen or more, all of similar size
- length up to 1.3 m

The largest parrotfish in the world: up to 1.3 m (4.3 ft) and 75 kg (165 lb), blue-green, with a squared bony forehead and a beak worn pale by use. Schools of a dozen adults moving along a reef edge sound like construction work, because that is effectively what it is.

It eats live coral, and it uses its head to get it. Adults ram coral heads to break off pieces before biting them, and the forehead bulge is the tool - the only fish known to headbutt its food. Males also ram each other head-on in disputes, at speed, which was filmed for the first time only in 2012.

The throughput is enormous. A single adult processes on the order of five tonnes of reef structure a year, grinding it in a throat mill and passing it out as sand, so a school of them is a geological agent as much as an animal - they are among the largest producers of coral sand anywhere.

They sleep in caves in groups and are therefore trivially easy to spear at night, which is why a fish that was once common across the Indo-Pacific is now scarce almost everywhere and gone from many reefs. It is Vulnerable, slow-growing and late to mature, and a sighting here is genuinely rare.

## Also known as

- **English:** bumphead parrotfish, Double-headed Parrotfish, green humphead parrotfish
- **French:** Perroquet bossu vert, Perroquet à bosse, Filambase
- **Spanish:** Loro Cototo Verde
- **Turkish:** tepeli papagan baligi
- **Japanese:** カンムリブダイ, Kammuribudai
- **Chinese:** 隆頭鸚哥魚, 駝峰大鸚嘴魚, 驼峰大鹦嘴鱼

## Scientific synonyms

- *Bolbomatopon muricatum* (Valenciennes, 1840)
- *Bolbometopon muricantum* (Valenciennes, 1840)
- *Bolbometopon muricatus* (Valenciennes, 1840)
- *Bulbometopon muricatum* (Valenciennes, 1840)
- *Callyodon muricatus* (Valenciennes, 1840)
- *Scarus muricatus* Valenciennes, 1840

## Range

East Africa, Federal Republic of Somalia, Kenya, Mozambique, Red Sea, Seychelles, Tanzania

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/parrotfishes/green-humphead-parrotfish)*
*Updated: August 12, 2026*