A pale elongate sand fish that lives under a mound of rubble it carries in piece by piece.
A slender, cylindrical fish to about 30 cm, pale grey to yellowish and almost unmarked over the body, with a blunt rounded head and long low dorsal and anal fins. The tail carries two dark horizontal bands separated by pale ground, which is the character the common name refers to and the one that shows at distance as the fish moves away. Juveniles are paler and often have a dark stripe along the flank.
It lives over open sand near reef and maintains a burrow beneath a heap of coral rubble and shell that the fish assembles itself, carrying fragments in the mouth from the surrounding ground. The mound is a permanent structure and other animals use the gaps in it. A pair generally shares one site. Feeding is on small invertebrates and fish taken from the sediment surface within a radius of the mound.
The fish hangs a metre or two above the bottom and drops into the mound when a diver closes, so the mound is usually noticed before the fish is identified. Recorded from a few metres to about 45 m across the Indo-Pacific and into the eastern Pacific. On muck ground it is generally the deeper sand flats rather than the silt that hold it, because the burrow needs rubble to roof it.
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.