Blackbacked Butterflyfish

About

The Blackbacked Butterflyfish (Chaetodon melannotus) is one of the more recognizable members of its family, wearing a white-to-yellowish body overlaid with diagonal black stripes and a broad dark saddle across the back that gives the fish its name. A bold black stripe runs through the eye, and the tail is edged in yellow and black. A tidy, well-defined look that makes identification in the field or in a store tank pretty straightforward. Its range is impressively wide, stretching from the Red Sea and East Africa all the way out to Samoa, with populations recorded throughout Micronesia, southern Japan, and as far south as Lord Howe Island. In the wild, adults are typically found on coral-rich reef flats, lagoons, and seaward reef slopes, living alone or in pairs. And that pairing bond tends to be stable, with couples often seen foraging together. The diet is the main challenge in captivity: this species actively targets the soft tissue of both hard and soft coral polyps, which means it is genuinely reef-unsafe and will cause real damage in a mixed coral system. In a fish-only setup it can adapt reasonably well and is considered manageable for an intermediate keeper, but anyone hoping to keep it alongside their coral collection should look elsewhere.