Carries a false pair of eyes on its dorsal fins and raises them to imitate a crab.
A pale, heavily built goby to about 6 cm, mottled in fawn and brown, with a large dark ocellus ringed in pale blue on each of the two dorsal fins. Raised together the two spots sit side by side above the body at roughly the spacing and height of a crab’s eyestalks, and the fish’s habit of moving in short lateral hops completes the resemblance. The interpretation is longstanding and plausible rather than experimentally demonstrated. No other goby in the region carries this arrangement, so the species is unmistakable once seen.
Occurs in pairs that stay within a metre or two of one another and share a burrow dug under rubble or a shell. Feeds by taking a mouthful of fine sediment, sorting it over the gill rakers and expelling the cleaned sand, which leaves small conical spoil heaps around the burrow entrance and is a reliable way to locate a pair. Recorded from about 2 to 30 m, always on fine silty sand, most often on the sheltered margin where sand meets reef rather than out on open slope. Nervous, and inclined to drop into the burrow if approached from above; staying low and still usually brings the pair back within a minute.
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.
