A small Galapagos goby of the sand and rubble fringe, with orange spots and a dark tail-base mark between two white ones.
To about 7 cm. The head carries a series of reddish-orange stripes, the body about five horizontal rows of reddish-orange to brown spots, and there is a pair of red-orange spots at the base of the pectoral fin. The mark that gives it its name is at the base of the tail: a dark brown spot with a white spot above and below it. The pelvic fins are fused into a disc.
It lives on the sand and rubble fringe of rocky reef and coral patches between about 2 and 40 m, foraging on tiny crustaceans among the rocks and darting for cover when approached. Over sand the orange spots look like sand grains. It is not a cleaner, which is worth saying because several small gobies elsewhere are.
The scientific name here has been corrected. This entry previously used Elacatinus puncticulatus. That fish is the redhead goby, a Gulf of California and mainland Mexican species that is not recorded from the Galapagos at all. The Galapagos redlight goby is Coryphopterus urospilus, which the Charles Darwin Foundation checklist lists as native and which occurs from Baja California south to Peru including Revillagigedo, Cocos, Malpelo and the Galapagos.
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.
