Blue-black with a broad yellow crescent across the flank and a yellow tail. A Red Sea and Arabian species.
To about 50 cm. The adult is brownish-blue to blue-grey with a blue margin to every scale, a large yellow bar on the flank, and filaments trailing from the soft dorsal and anal fins. The juvenile is black with vertical blue and white bars and the yellow confined to the rear of the tail.
The Arabian angelfish is the pair and the tail settles it: solidly yellow there, not here. The yellow flank bar also curves and tapers towards the belly on this fish and is a straighter crescent on that one.
Four to sixty metres. It is more tolerant of silt and poor visibility than most angelfish and is found in sheltered places that mix coral and silt — reef slopes, wrecks, silty bays — rather than in dense coral. Solitary, curious and not shy of divers.
It changes sex, older females becoming male when males are scarce, and it has been recorded to thirty-six years old. It eats sponges and tunicates. FishBase gives it a very high climate-change vulnerability score.
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.