A pale barred damselfish tied to branching coral, so it thins where the Acropora has gone.
A deep-bodied damselfish to about 11 cm, pale greenish-yellow to grey-white with five dusky vertical bars and a yellow wash over the fins, the whole fish looking washed out rather than patterned. The golden damsel Amblyglyphidodon aureus is uniformly deep yellow and has no bars, and the whitebelly damsel Amblyglyphidodon leucogaster has a plain body with a white belly. Juvenile sergeants of the genus Abudefduf share the barred look but their bars are hard black on a silver ground and their bodies are more streamlined, which usually settles it at a glance.
It takes zooplankton in the water column just above the coral and grazes algae, and it stays close to branching corals, particularly staghorn and other Acropora thickets, dropping into the branches whenever anything approaches. That dependence shows in how common it is from place to place: it is abundant over the intact staghorn stands of Papua New Guinea and regular on the Bali and Anilao coral slopes, but on the silty slopes of Lembeh Strait and the Dauin coast, where branching coral is reduced to scattered thickets, the fish is reduced to those thickets with it.
Males clear a patch of dead coral or a hydroid stem, court passing females over it and then guard the eggs, and a guarding male at a nest is more approachable than the species usually is because he will not leave the patch. Recorded from the shallows to about 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.