Orange lines run lengthways along the head and turn to bars across the back half of the body.
A small goby to about 8 cm, pale grey to white with a pattern that changes direction along the body: three or four orange to brown lines run lengthways from the snout through the eye and across the front half, and behind the dorsal fin they give way to a set of vertical bars of the same colour. Where the two meet, over the middle of the body, the effect is a coarse crosshatch, and that junction is the reliable field character. There is usually a dark spot at the base of the tail.
It lives on sand and fine rubble at the foot of reef, usually in pairs that stay within a few metres of one another, and feeds by taking mouthfuls of sediment, sorting the small animals out of it over the gills and dropping the sand back. A short burrow under a stone or a piece of dead coral is used as a retreat, and the fish goes into it head first when pressed rather than swimming away across open ground.
Recorded from about 3 to 30 m through the western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean. It sits still for longer than most small gobies of open sand, which is why it appears in photographs out of proportion to how often it is logged.
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.
