Yellow-white with eight narrow black bars, and it lives inside branching coral.
To about 12 cm, one of the smaller butterflyfishes here. Pale yellow to white with eight narrow black vertical bars including one through the eye, and yellow fin margins. Juveniles are similar and are found in the same coral heads.
It is an obligate coral feeder taking Acropora and Porites polyps, and unlike most of the family it stays within the branches of a single colony rather than ranging across a slope, which makes it easy to relocate and awkward to photograph — there is almost always a branch in the way. It is common on the coral heads of Indonesian and Philippine inshore reef, including on muck sites. Recorded from about 2 to 20 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.