A small black goby with a brilliant blue stripe, working a cleaning station on a coral head. Larger fish queue and hold still for it.
To 5 cm. Elongate and compressed, with a pointed shark-like snout overhanging the mouth. A single brilliant electric-blue stripe runs from just in front of the eyes almost to the end of the tail, over a black body, with a broad dark lower stripe running to the end of the tail fin.
The check against the other cleaning gobies is the snout, and it is easy: this species has no marking on the snout at all, and the blue stripe begins at the eye. Every one of the yellow-V species has a V across the snout.
It is an obligate cleaner. It sets up a cleaning station on a coral head, or on rock or the outside of a large sponge, and removes parasites from the skin, fins, mouth and gill chambers of larger fish. Pairs are monogamous and stay in one place. It lives between 1 and about 45 m.
This is the Florida and Gulf of Mexico species and essentially only that: it is absent from the Bahamas and the wider Caribbean, where other cleaning gobies take its place. It was one of the first marine fish bred commercially and is still heavily captive-bred.
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.
