Orange, crossed by white bars edged in blue, with a yellow tail - the fish everyone photographs badly, because it puts a coral head between itself and the camera and keeps it there. To 25 cm (10 in).
The local ones are not quite the ones in the books. 🌊 Red Sea and western 🌊 Indian Ocean fish have a yellow-orange chest; from the Pacific the same species has it gray. The difference is consistent enough that a photograph can be placed to an ocean by that patch alone.
It eats sponges and tunicates, and that is the whole reason it is famous in a way it never asked for. In an aquarium a specialist like this usually refuses everything on offer and starves, which is how the most beautiful fish on the reef became the one experienced keepers warn each other about. On the reef it is simply doing what it does: working the overhangs, picking at things nothing else wants.
Pairs hold a territory and stay in it for years. Like other angelfish it starts female and can turn male, so a pair that loses one fish reorganizes rather than dissolves.
The genus. Pygoplites Fraser-Brunner 1933 - pyge (rump or rear) + [h]oplites (armed). ETYFish
The species. Pygoplites diacanthus (Boddaert 1772) - di- (two) + acanthus (thorn or spine). ETYFish
- orange body crossed by blue-edged white bars
- yellow tail, dark blue anal fin with pale lines
- chest yellow-orange here, gray in the Pacific
- never far from a hole, and dives into it before you are close
- length up to 25 cm
Why it's threatened
While animals are collected extensively for the aquarium trade in some areas, this does appear to constitute a major threat to the species. There are no other major threats to the species.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
