The pajama cardinalfish, spotted cardinalfish, coral cardinalfish, or polkadot cardinalfish (''Sphaeramia nematoptera'') is a species of fish belonging to the family

Apogonidae Cardinalfishes are a family, Apogonidae, of ray-finned fishes found in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans; they are chiefly marine, but some species are found in brackish water and a few (notably ''Glossamia'') are found in fresh water. A h ...

. It is a popular

aquarium fish Lists of aquarium life include lists of fish, amphibians, invertebrates and plants in freshwater, brackish and marine aquariums. In fishkeeping, suitable species of aquarium fish, plants and other organisms vary with the size, water chemistry a ...

. It grows to a total length around and features distinctive red eyes and a broad, dark, vertical 'waistband' with scattered red spots toward the tail. It is considered to be of low vulnerability, and is distributed throughout much of the western

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the contine ...

, from

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

to Fiji, and from the

Ryukyu Islands The , also known as the or the , are a chain of Japanese islands that stretch southwest from Kyushu to Taiwan: the Ōsumi, Tokara, Amami, Okinawa, and Sakishima Islands (further divided into the Miyako and Yaeyama Islands), with Yona ...

south to the

Great Barrier Reef The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest coral reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for over over an area of approximately . The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, ...

. The male pajama cardinalfish incubates the eggs in his mouth until they hatch. Pajama cardinalfish display a rainbow of colors. They have greenish-yellow faces, bright orange eyes, and silver-based bodies dressed with a bold black scalar margin and posteriors dotted with orange polka dots. Though their bold coloration may stand out, ''S. nematoptera'' fish have a peaceful nature that lets them blend perfectly into most community saltwater aquaria. Like many other schooling fish, pajama cardinalfish form a strict hierarchy when kept in small groups within the aquarium. However, unlike some social fish, this member of the family Apogonidae does not use aggression to exert dominance over other cardinalfish.

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nemoptera ''Nemoptera'' is a Palearctic genus of insects of the spoonwing family, Nemopteridae. All species are diurnal with an exclusively floral diet, preferring to fly in open spaces in full sunshine while visiting flowers. They can be recognized by th ...

Fish of Southeast Asia Fish of Indonesia Taxa named by Pieter Bleeker Fish described in 1856 {{Kurtiformes-stub