Buries upright in sand with only the eyes and the steeply upturned mouth showing.
A lizardfish with a very short, blunt snout and a large mouth set at a steep upward angle, a profile no other synodontid in the region has and one that is recognisable even when the rest of the fish is under the sand. Commonly around 15 cm, recorded to about 40. The body carries alternating blue-grey and yellow lines running its length, and a dark blotch sits on the shoulder behind the gill cover. Against the Synodus lizardfishes, which rest on the surface of the sediment propped on their pelvic fins and only rarely bury, this one is almost always in the sand.
The name is worth a note. The fish was recorded for a century as Trachinocephalus myops and treated as a single circumtropical species. A 2016 revision split the complex, restricting T. myops to the Atlantic, applying T. trachinus to the Indo-Pacific population and describing a third species from the Marquesas. Guides, dive logs and a good deal of the aquarium and fisheries literature still use the older name, so the two names in practice refer to the same animal here.
Open sand, silt and fine rubble from the shallows to about 40 m. It settles into the sediment with a few shuffles until only the eyes and the top of the head are exposed, waits, and takes small fishes with a short upward strike. The teeth are numerous, fine and backward-pointing, and a buried fish that is trodden on will use them.
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.
