Sand-sifting goby with a yellow head and a bright blue stripe below the eye.
A sleeper goby to about 18 cm with a pale, almost translucent white body and a yellow head, crossed by a narrow iridescent blue stripe that runs from the corner of the mouth back below the eye and onto the gill cover. The combination is unambiguous and it is the easiest Valenciennea to name in the water. Valenciennea puellaris has an unmarked head and rows of orange dashes down the body; Valenciennea sexguttata has separate blue spots rather than a continuous line. The first dorsal fin is drawn out into a short filament in adults.
Lives in pairs in a burrow it excavates itself under a rock or slab, and there is no shrimp partner. It feeds by scooping sand into the mouth, filtering the small crustaceans and worms out and venting the clean sediment through the gills, which produces the fine trail that marks where a pair has been working. Pairs hold a territory and both fish carry mouthfuls of rubble to reinforce the burrow entrance.
Recorded from the shallows to about 25 m, usually on clean sand and rubble adjacent to coral rather than out on deep silt. It is among the commoner large gobies on those bottoms and is often overlooked because it is neither rare nor small. It hops rather than swims, keeps a fixed distance from an approaching diver, and generally does not use the burrow unless pressed hard.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
