A long pale fish that builds a mound of rubble on open sand and dives into it head first when approached.
To about 70 cm, common at 50. Very elongate and cylindrical, pale bluish-white to tan with a blunt snout and a crescent-shaped tail. Nothing on Caribbean sand resembles it.
You will usually see the mound before the fish. It builds and tends a mound of coral rubble and shell fragments over its burrow, hovers a metre or so above it, and drops in head-first as a diver closes.
Ten to a hundred and fifty metres, usually ten to fifty, on sand and rubble near reef and grass beds. It eats mantis shrimps, small fish, worms, chitons, urchins, sea stars, amphipods and shrimps.
It is listed as capable of causing injury: it bites when handled.
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.