Ecology shapes the evolutionary trade-off between predator avoidance and defence in coral reef butterflyfishes

The data include morphometric measurements of traits important in predator defence, detection and avoidance, and ecological classifications of foraging strategy and social behaviour. The datafile details the butterflyfish species examined, the number of specimens measured per species, the collections the specimens were loaned from and their catalogue numbers, the species-averaged morphometric measurements (mm), and the ecological data classifications of species' foraging strategies and social behaviour, with references.