Awesome Fish Spotlight: Roa excelsa

Roa excelsa is a unique deepwater butterflyfish that is part of a very interesting genus of reef fish. The Excelsa butterflyfish has three sibling species including Roa modesta, Roa jayakari and the fairly new Roa australis. We’ve featured the modest butterflyfish,…

Awesome Fish Spotlight: Roa modestus, the poor man’s excelsa

Roa is one of our favourite genus of deepwater butterflyfish and although it contains at least four members, only Roa excelsa is frequently covered. All Roa species are patterned in the same template of brown and white vertical bands, and are deepwater fish…

Video updates on BlueHarbor’s Roa excelsa and Prognathodes basabei

It has been a few weeks since the butterflyfish demigods landed in BlueHarbor, and we’re pleased to report that they are doing amazing. We first caught wind of these fish while they were still with Rufus Kimura, and then again…

Hong Kong scores with two butterflyfish demigods – Prognathodes basabei and Roa excelsa

Apart from FOWLR dominated set ups and the typical over-stocked fish tanks that have fast become a stereotype there, the reefing scene of Hong Kong is well known for another aspect of the hobby – the ability to procure rare…

Roa excelsa video is the first of this kind for this twilight reef fish

[youtube width=”680″ height=”400″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59M-xZ801Jc[/youtube] Blue Harbor Japan just shared this video of a live Roa excelsa as it is being coaxed into feeding, perhaps for the first time. The Roa excelsa video is much more clear than the still preview image…

Roa excelsa status: one is still swimming

As we reported a while back, one of the best shops in Japan, Blue Harbor, obtained two Roa excelsa from Hawaii three weeks ago. Unfortunately, one of the butterflyfish was already dead in a plastic bag when they arrived at…

Rare Butterflyfish Parade: Roa excelsa, Roaps flavocoronatus and a new Roaps tinkeri hybrid

Not sure what is in the air lately but have we got the goods on a nice handful of uber rare butterflyfish fish for you. Hot on the heels of the orange margin butterflyfish, Prognathodes basabei, we have an odd-phase…

Adding a New Fish to A Boisterous Saltwater Aquarium Display

We never thought we’d see that day that our YouTube channel would feature a how-to about adding a gold crown butterflyfish to a display tank that is already home to a large mature adult Tinker’s butterflyfish but here we are.…

The ‘Cleanest’ Flavocoronatus Butterflyfish Appears at SDC-ERI

The gold crown butterflyfish, Chaetodon flavocoronatus, is one of the rarest species of butterflyfish that we’ve been writing about since 2009, but had never seen for ourselves until last week. Closely related to the tinker’s butterflyfish from Hawaii, the declivis butterflyfish…

10 Rare Hawaiian Aquarium Fish

Hawaii is well known as a hot spot of endemism both above and below the water and this is a fact which aquarium fish fanciers are very well acquainted with. Many common shallow water species that have been enjoyed by…