A large white sleeper goby with two dark stripes running the length of the body.
The largest of the sleeper gobies met on muck ground, reaching about 18 cm, white to pale cream with two narrow dark brown stripes running from the snout to the tail, one along the upper flank and one lower down. The first dorsal fin is tall and carries a black spot or blotch, and the fin is raised repeatedly while the fish is feeding. The pattern is constant enough that the species is one of the few Valenciennea that does not need a close look.
Animals live in pairs and hold a stretch of sand and rubble between them. Feeding is by sifting: a mouthful of sediment is taken, worked over the gill rakers and expelled through the gill covers as a small plume, and a pair working a patch leaves a trail of these plumes behind it. Both fish maintain a burrow under a slab or a lump of rubble, carrying stones to the entrance in the mouth, and the burrow is where they go when a diver comes too close and where they spend the night.
Recorded from about 10 m down to well past normal diving depth on open sand across the Indo-Pacific. It is more often found deeper than the blueband and orange-dashed gobies, and a pair moving steadily across sand rather than a fish sitting still is the usual first sighting.
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.
