A small sand goatfish, freckled red-brown, with a dark stripe from snout to tail and barred tail lobes.
A goatfish to about 30 cm, pale grey to whitish with a dark brown to blackish stripe running from the snout through the eye to the base of the tail, a dense scatter of small red-brown freckles over the back and upper flank, and both lobes of the tail crossed by dark bars. Two chin barbels are carried folded into a groove and extended in use. Colour darkens and the freckling intensifies on a fish over black sand.
It works soft sediment, seagrass and silty sand rather than clean reef sand, sweeping the barbels through the top centimetre or two and taking worms, small crustaceans and buried molluscs from the plume it raises. Juveniles are common in very shallow water, often in a few centimetres over sand flats and around river mouths, and are considerably more marked than adults. The dash-and-dot goatfish, which has its own entry, is much larger, keeps to firmer sand and carries a clean stripe and a separate tail-base spot rather than freckling.
Recorded across the Indo-West Pacific from the shallows to about 40 m, and it tolerates brackish water. It is one of the commonest fish on a muck site and is usually ignored, which is a fair description of what happens to most abundant sand species.
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.