Blacklip Butterflyfish

The body of this fish is yellowish brown with 1–2 broad lighter vertical bars, one running from near the origin of the dorsal spine to the belly, and sometimes another running from the middle of the back to the center of the body. A black bar runs vertically across the eye, and the part before this is whitish, with a black snout. The color varies somewhat across the range; western specimens usually have one beige bar, while eastern ones have two white bars. There may be numerous dotted horizontal stripes on the sides or another dark band between the two light ones in eastern specimens.

It is a native of the Indo-Pacific region, from the Red Sea and East Africa to the Hawaiian Islands and Samoa, north to southern Japan, south to Australia and New Caledonia. It is also found in the Galapagos Islands in the Eastern Pacific.

The sunburst butterflyfish was first formally described in 1790 by the German naturalist and physician Marcus Elieser Bloch (1723–1799) with the type locality given as the East Indies (Ostindien). The specific name honours the German jurist, historian, botanist, zoologist and mathematician Jacob Theodor Klein (1685–1759) who illustrated this species in volume 4 of his 5-volume history of fishes, which drew Bloch's attention. Under its junior synonym, C. corallicola was placed in the monotypic subgenus Tifia, but this cannot be separated from the earlier-described Lepidochaetodon (sometimes considered a separate genus). It appears to be closer to the Tahiti butterflyfish (C. trichrous) than to the teardrop butterflyfish (C. unimaculatus).