The best known Revillagigedo endemic: an orange angelfish found across the archipelago and, in small numbers, nowhere else.
To about 20 cm. The adult is brownish orange with a dark brown head and a broad bright orange area immediately behind it; the tail is orange and the dorsal and anal fins are orange edged with blue. Juveniles are brownish orange with narrow blue bars on the side and a pair on the head, and the bars narrow and disappear as the fish grows. The confusion is with the king angelfish, which occurs here too, and one character settles it: the king angelfish carries a narrow white vertical bar on the side at the level of the rear edge of the pectoral fin, and this fish has none.
It is found across the archipelago and in very small numbers at Clipperton, Guadalupe, Alijos Rocks, the tip of Baja California and Banderas Bay. Juveniles are solitary and hold a territory; adults move about and are seen in groups of up to about thirty. The behaviour worth knowing is that they clean: they gather three to five metres above the bottom at fixed points and take parasites off giant mantas, which is why they are usually the first fish a diver notices at El Boiler. It eats sponges, tunicates, hydroids, small crustaceans, molluscs, zooplankton and some algae.
It is listed as Vulnerable and it has a trade history. Between 2007 and 2015 Mexico authorised 3,371 for collection and 2,751 were exported to the United States, at two hundred to five hundred dollars to the fisherman and two to five thousand internationally. It went onto CITES Appendix II in January 2017 and the archipelago was declared a national park in November of that year, which ended collection. Captive-bred stock has been in the trade since about 2013.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.