A cleaner goby with a yellow V on the snout that becomes a pale blue line along the body. The commonest cleaner in the eastern Caribbean.
To 4 cm. Elongate with a pointed shark-like snout and an underslung mouth, which is the name. A yellow or white stripe runs in front of each eye and the two meet at the snout tip to form a distinct V, continuing back along the body, and a black stripe begins on the snout, passes through the lower part of the eye and runs to the tail. There are three regional colour forms: yellow in the central Bahamas, yellow and blue through the northern Caribbean, and white in the western Caribbean.
Several cleaning gobies share the region. The Florida neon goby has no snout marking at all. The cleaner goby has the yellow V continuing into wide white or yellow body stripes. The yellownose goby has a thin bright blue line under the yellow stripe between eye and pectoral fin, and the yellowline goby has a yellow stripe from eye to tail with no snout marking.
It is an obligate cleaner, working from coral heads, rock rubble and large sponges on clear-water oceanic reef between 1 and about 50 m, and it lives in monogamous pairs.
Two occurrence rows have been removed. It is not recorded from Florida, where the cleaner is the neon goby. And it is not recorded from the Cayman Islands: the Cayman cleaning goby is a separate endemic species described in 2014 by DNA barcoding, which had previously been filed under another name.
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.
