Snorkeling with butterflyfishes in Palau

Butterflyfishes are some of the most popular reef fishes in the world. They are colorful, active during the day, and can be found on shallow reefs in a variety of marine habitats. Palau has 35 species of butterflyfishes and most are easily accessible for snorkelers. Our goal on our recent snorkeling trip was to see as many as we can and make a poster of those we saw.

I built the poster template that included 24 spaces, and off we went to collect our photos. After the first snorkeling, I realized we might have a problem. We had 24 spaces available, but the accessibility to butterflyfishes in Palau is so incredible that we could have made most of the total number without much stress! In the end, we decided to have the poster revolve around butterflyfishes in the genus Chaetodon, forgoing the inclusion of the bannerfishes (genus Heniochus), but did include the long-nose butterflyfish (Forciper flavissimus) and the ever abundant pyramid butterflyfish (Hemitaurichthys polylepis).

Our poster turned out to be pretty good! We photographed almost all of the butterflyfishes in the genus Chaetodon (missing out on the deep dwelling C. burgessi for obvious reasons) and a couple of others for lack of sightings. Not too bad for 10 days of snorkeling and we cannot wait to return in 2019 to build another poster, this time perhaps making it a bit larger…

The poster measures 28 x 42 and is about 5 MB in size. Click on the image to download…