A pale sand goby with a gold spot above the pectoral fin base and a dark bar through the eye, sitting still on open sand.
Males to about 8 cm, females to about 6. Whitish with six to eight staggered rows of dark brown spots and two brownish-orange stripes running back from the eye and the gill cover.
Two marks identify it. A narrow dark bar crosses the head above the eye and continues below the middle of the eye, like a slash through the eye. And there is a prominent gold spot, ringed by an incomplete dark ring, immediately above the base of the pectoral fin. The bridled goby and its relatives, which share the same sand, have no gold shoulder spot.
It lives on open sand at the base of reef and in rock and rubble between about half a metre and 85 m, often alongside bridled gobies. It feeds by taking sand into its mouth and pushing it out through the gill openings, filtering the food out as it goes, which is easy to watch.
Its range is unusual: Bermuda to Brazil in the west, and again at Ascension, St Helena, Madeira, Cape Verde and the Canaries in the east.
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.
