Yellow Butterflyfish

1 Yellow Butterflyfish Overview

The Yellow Butterflyfish is mainly found in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, living in coral reefs at 3–20 m depth. Its beautiful appearance and easy care make it popular with aquarists.

Chinese name: Yellow Butterflyfish

Binomial: Chaetodon semilarvatus

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Subphylum: Vertebrata

Class: Osteichthyes

Subclass: Actinopterygii

Order: Perciformes

Suborder: Percoidei

Family: Chaetodontidae

Subfamily: Chaetodontinae

Genus: Chaetodon

Species: Yellow Butterflyfish

English name: Bluecheek butterflyfish

2 Appearance

The Yellow Butterflyfish is golden and very beautiful, with butterflyfish habits. It breeds about once a month and is mainly found in the western Indian Ocean’s Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

The body is rounded and entirely golden yellow, with a large purple spot on the gill cover and more than 12 red vertical stripes on the flanks; the caudal fin edge is brown. It reaches 23 cm. Vividly colored and gracefully shaped, it is golden with light-brown vertical stripes and a pretty blue mask over the eyes.

3 Habitat

Keep the Yellow Butterflyfish with a suitable environment. Because it is gentle, it can be mixed with similarly sized, gentle tropical fish.

Nitrifying bacteria help water quality most; protein skimmers are onlyauxiliary. To optimize skimmer effect, run a wet foam that quickly removes dirty water as a water change—topping up daily beats changing every week or month. Always quarantine for parasites; parasites are a major cause of butterflyfish death. The fish have weak resistance and bacteria cannot be quarantined—parasites and bacteria are different, since drugs easily kill parasites with little effect on fish and nitrifying bacteria, whereas sterilization requires killing the fish and bacteria together, so bacterial infection cannot be fully cured by drugs.

4 Feeding

What to feed the Yellow Butterflyfish matters; its color is vivid and beloved, but poor feeding and care can dull it.

Common raw foods are frozen shrimp meat, clams and bloodworms; brine shrimp and artemia are not recommended, as saltwater fish have no immunity to freshwater bacteria. If used, cook them. Fish that won’t eat clams or shrimp usually won’t eat bloodworms either; bloodworms are no better, and artemia are mostly water with low nutrition. Experiments show marine parasites cannot survive freezing, so parasite worry is moot.