A small eastern butterflyfish that replaces the spotband species east of about Sulawesi.
A small butterflyfish to about 13 cm, white to cream in front and orange over the rear body and tail base, marked with rows of dark dots that run diagonally upwards and backwards across the flank. A black bar crosses the eye and a second crosses the tail. The confusion is with the spotband butterflyfish Chaetodon punctatofasciatus, which carries dark vertical bars across the upper body in addition to the rows of spots and lacks the strong orange rear. Where the two ranges meet they hybridise, and intermediate fish showing partial bars over an orange rear are regularly photographed.
It feeds on coral polyps, small invertebrates and filamentous algae picked off hard substrate, usually singly or in pairs on coral-rich slopes. It is a fish of the eastern half of the region: it is the common small spotted butterflyfish in Papua New Guinea and through Micronesia, thins westward across Indonesia, and is largely replaced by C. punctatofasciatus in the Philippines and the western Indonesian islands. Records at the western end of that gradient are worth checking against the barring before they are logged.
It stays close to the substrate and works small territories, so a fish lost behind a coral head usually reappears within a minute or two on the same patch. Recorded from about 3 to 30 m.
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.