A transparent goby larva flecked with orange and black, taken in open water at night.
A transparent larval fish of a few millimetres with a large eye, a visible gut and, in many of them, patches of orange and black chromatophores scattered over the body and spread through the fins. The shape is the giveaway: an elongate body, a blunt head, and paired fins set low, which is a goby’s plan drawn in glass.
The family is as far as a photograph goes, and often further than it should. Gobiidae is the largest family of marine fish, the larvae of most of its species have never been described, and several unrelated families produce larvae that look much the same in open water at night. A larval goby is logged as a larval goby.
Taken on blackwater dives over deep water, where the larva is part of the nightly migration into the surface layers. It settles to the bottom at the end of that stage and becomes one of the small gobies of the sand and rubble, most of which are on this site under names it gives no hint of.
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.
