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Fourspot Butterflyfish
Chaetodon quadrimaculatus
The four-spotted butterflyfish or fourspot butterflyfish (Chaetodon quadrimaculatus) is a species of butterflyfish (family Chaetodontidae) found in the Pacific Ocean from the Ryukyus, Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands and Taiwan to the Hawaiian, Marquesan, and Pitcairn islands, south to the Samoan and Austral Islands and the Marianas and Marshall Islands in Micronesia.
The fourspot butterflyfish is a marine coralivorous organism. Therefore, its noted geographic distribution, as well as population-level spatial distribution and temporal variation in density, is correlated to relative distributions and abundance of the corals that butterflyfish are dependent on for food.
From the article Fourspot butterflyfish on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), quoted section by section
What it does
C. quadrimaculatus is an obligate, hard coral feeder, an adaptation that is theorized to have evolved approximately 3.2 million years ago. This species is highly dependent on scleractinian corals, an order of Anthozoa where approximately 50% of species are reef-building zooxanthellate. Butterflyfish typically feed from corals by removing individual polyps while leaving the calcareous skeleton undisturbed. They use a picking method where they grip prey with the tips of their upper and lower anterior jaws. Due to their specialized dependence on corals, C. quadrimaculatus and other obligate corallivorous species have an increased bite rate, pointing to a higher feeding efficiency, than butterflyfish that are facultative corallivores.
Wikipedia: “Diet and feeding”
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
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geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Chaetodon quadrimaculatus in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 97192.