Broad dark bars wider than the pale ground between them, and blue flecking over the head.
A shrimpgoby to about 12 cm, one of the larger Amblyeleotris on soft ground. Pale to fawn, crossed by four or five broad dark brown bars that are wider than the pale ground between them - the character the name is built on - and with the head, cheeks and the front of the body scattered with small iridescent blue to blue-green spots and dashes. The colour reads very differently by light: over dark sand and under a strobe the bars close up and the fish photographs as a dark animal picked out in blue.
The bars separate it from the spotted shrimpgoby Amblyeleotris guttata, which is spotted rather than barred, and their width separates it from Amblyeleotris steinitzi and Amblyeleotris wheeleri, whose bars are narrower than the ground between them. Amblyeleotris randalli carries a raised first dorsal with a dark ocellus, which this fish does not.
Lives in a shared burrow with an alpheid snapping shrimp on the same terms as every other shrimpgoby. The shrimp digs and maintains the tunnel and keeps an antenna in contact with the fish while it works at the entrance; the goby holds station above the hole and a flick of its tail sends both underground. Recorded on sand and rubble slopes between about 5 and 30 m, generally deeper than the shallow Cryptocentrus of the silt.
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.
