A heavy-bodied shrimpgoby, grey-green with pink to red speckling over the head.
A stout shrimpgoby to about 12 cm, olive to grey-brown with four or five diffuse darker saddles and a dense scatter of small pink to red spots over the head, the cheek and the front of the body. The head is large and blunt and the body deeper than in the barred Amblyeleotris, which gives the fish a heavier look at rest. Colour varies with the ground: animals on mud run darker and greener, animals on pale sand are washed out and the speckling carries most of the identification.
It occupies the silty end of the range, on mud and fine sediment in sheltered bays and harbours where the water is often turbid, and is one of the commoner shrimpgobies on that ground. The burrow is shared with an alpheid shrimp and sits in soft sediment rather than in coarse sand, which means the entrance collapses and is rebuilt continually and the spoil heap beside it is fine mud rather than shell.
The fish sits well up on its pectoral fins with the tail still in the mouth of the burrow and drops in when a diver closes to within a couple of metres, coming back in stages after the movement stops. Recorded through the Indo-West Pacific from a few metres to about 25 m.
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.
