🐠 Ornate Butterflyfish (Chaetodon ornatissimus)
A Light Blue Body With Diagonal Orange Bands • A Yellow, Black-Barred Face • A Dedicated Coral Specialist
 
📋 The Ornate Butterflyfish, also known as the Clown Butterflyfish, has a striking light blue body marked with diagonal orange bands, and a yellow face outlined with two black, yellow-edged bars across the snout and eye.
It comes from a wide range across the Indo-Pacific, from the Red Sea to the Western Pacific, inhabiting clear, coral-rich lagoon and seaward reef environments. In the wild it feeds almost exclusively on live coral polyp tissue and mucus across around ten different coral species, one of the broadest coral diets of any corallivorous butterflyfish, but still a diet that needs a live coral food source to sustain long term. Every Ornate Butterflyfish we ship is feeding well, and we only sell this species to keepers with live coral available as an ongoing food source.
It's solitary as a juvenile, sheltering among branching corals, before pairing up for life as an adult, with pairs maintaining an exclusive home territory. It's not reef safe for most setups, since it will consume stony coral tissue as its primary food source, which is exactly what makes it such a specialist. It reaches up to 18-25cm, so plan on at least 280L.
 
💡 Highlights
🎨 Light Blue Body With Diagonal Orange Bands: A striking, iconic butterflyfish
🪸 A Dedicated Coral Specialist: Feeds on live coral polyp tissue across around ten species
💑 Pairs for Life: A fascinating natural history trait
🍽️ Ships Feeding Well: Sold only to keepers with a live coral food source ready
🌊 A Wide-Ranging Species: Found from the Red Sea to the Western Pacific