---
title: Spadefishes (Ephippidae)
scientific_name: Ephippidae
common_name: Spadefishes
rank: Family
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:43:02.866Z
tags: Spadefishes, Ephippidae, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/spadefishes
---

# Spadefishes (*Ephippidae*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Family
- **Scientific name:** Ephippidae
- **Body shape:** Disc - Round and flat as a plate, seen from the side - butterflyfishes, angelfishes.
- **Species listed here:** 3

## How to recognise this group

- disc-shaped body, much deeper than long
- large eyes set high on head
- silvery to grey body colour
- often forming schools

A young batfish spends everything it has on height. It grows upward rather than forward, the dorsal and anal fins drawn out into two long blades, so that a small one is already far taller than it is long and most of that height is fin. The reason is arithmetic. Most reef predators swallow whole and can take only what fits across the gape, and the quickest way out of that window is not to get longer, it is to get taller. The very young of one species take it further and drift on their sides pretending to be a dead leaf.

The adult is the same trick finished. The fins stop extending while the body fills in behind them, and two sails become a disc: a silver plate up to 70 cm (28 in) tall, broad enough that almost nothing can bite it and thin enough to half disappear when it turns edge-on. It hangs rather than swims, holding position beside a wreck or under a mooring line with barely a fin moving, and it is one of the few large reef fish that will come and look at a diver instead of leaving.

The diet is stranger than the shape. Batfish eat jellyfish, along with salps and the other drifting soft-bodied animals most fish will not touch, and they also take algae, small crustaceans and whatever is growing on the structure they live beside. On one damaged Pacific reef where heavy brown seaweed had replaced the coral and none of the known herbivores would deal with it, the fish that ate the weed back was a batfish nobody had counted as a grazer at all.

Three species are listed here. The one you will meet is the longfin, in loose groups of a dozen at mid-depth beside a wreck, which is why so many wreck photographs from this coast have a row of silver discs standing in the background.


## Species (3)

- [African Spadefish (Tripterodon orbis)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/spadefishes/african-spadefish)
- [Longfin Spadefish (Platax teira)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/spadefishes/longfin-spadefish)
- [Orbicular Batfish (Platax orbicularis)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/spadefishes/orbicular-batfish)

---

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