Buries in sand with only the eyes and mouth exposed. Almost always a night-dive find.
Large for a muck subject, to about 45 cm, though almost all of it is under the sand. The eyes are set on top of the head and the mouth is nearly vertical, so what you find is a face looking up out of the bottom. The identifying marks, when the fish is exposed, are a black first dorsal fin, black spots over the body, and white margins to the pectoral, second dorsal, anal and caudal fins — hence the other common name, whitemargin stargazer. Several Uranoscopus overlap across the Indo-Pacific and a buried animal is not always safely separable, so the face alone is often as far as an identification can honestly go.
It ambushes from burial, and it fishes: there is a genuine lure in the mouth, a thread-like brownish appendage with long filaments around its base, which the fish wriggles to draw prey within reach. Fringed cirri around the mouth keep sand out while it breathes. Two things are worth correcting. It is frequently said to deliver an electric shock of around fifty volts; electric organs in this family are documented only in the American Astroscopus and in the Mediterranean Uranoscopus scaber, derived from the muscles that move the eyeball, and nothing of the kind is recorded for this species. What it certainly does have is a large venomous spine on each shoulder, and wounds from it are described as potentially serious — which is the practical reason not to put a hand down blind on a sand slope. Reef flats and coastal sand and silt, from 5 m to well beyond diving depth.
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.