The largest shrimpgoby, to 25 cm, and a mud-slope animal rather than a clean-sand one.
The largest of the shrimpgobies, reaching about 25 cm where most of the genus stops under 12, and size is the practical character: a shrimpgoby of 20 cm or more on a mud slope in this region is this species and nothing else. The colour — pale grey to whitish with broad dusky bars and fine spotting on the head — is unremarkable and shared with several other Amblyeleotris, so a small individual is not reliably separable in the water from the commoner barred species. The fish is often taken at a glance for a small dartfish or a sand goby simply because nobody is looking for a shrimpgoby that size.
Silty inshore bottoms, coastal mud slopes, estuaries and muddy channels between about 5 and 30 m, and also the sand of sheltered lagoons. The burrow arrangement is the standard one: an alpheid shrimp digs and maintains the tunnel and keeps a constant antennal contact with the goby, which watches and signals with a flick of its tail when something approaches. A fish this size sees further and drops into the burrow from a greater distance than the small shrimpgobies do, so an approach has to start further back. Recorded from Sumatra east to the Moluccas, north to the Philippines and east to Palau and New Guinea.
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.
