Hovers upright over a burrow it has built itself, and the male broods the eggs in his mouth.
A pale, blunt-headed fish that hangs vertically in the mouth of a burrow with only the head and a little of the body showing. The identifying features are the very large mouth and jaw, eyes set high and far forward on the head, and a gold-yellow band running back from behind the eye across the gill cover — the “gold specs” of the name. The body is fawn to grey, marked with faint darker bars, and the whole fish drops out of sight the moment it decides you are too close.
The burrow is the animal’s own work and is the reason it stays put. It excavates a vertical shaft in coarse sand and lines the walls with pebbles, shell fragments and coral rubble carried up in its mouth one piece at a time, which is why a jawfish is nearly always found on ground with something to build from rather than on fine silt. Sand alone collapses; rubble holds. Dislodged stones are put back.
The male broods. He takes the fertilised egg mass into his mouth and holds it there for the several days it takes to develop, aerating it by rolling the ball forward and back, and spitting it out briefly to tumble it before drawing it back in. Late in the brood the eyes of the embryos are visible through the shell as a mass of black dots, and a photograph of that moment is the reason most people come looking. He cannot feed while he is holding them.
How to work with one: settle on the sand at a distance and stop moving. The fish comes back up in stages — first the eyes, then the head, then the body — and the mouth-rolling only happens when it is calm. Advancing on the burrow returns it to the bottom of the shaft and ends the encounter for several minutes.
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.