A small burrow-dwelling jawfish whose markings differ from one animal to the next.
A jawfish to about 10 cm, smaller and slighter than the gold-specs jawfish it shares ground with, and without that species’ clean gold band behind the eye. The head is blunt, the mouth and jaw are large in proportion to the body, and the eyes sit high and well forward. Colour is the difficulty: animals run from pale grey through fawn to dark brown, some plain, some barred, some heavily blotched, and two fish from adjacent burrows can look like two species. The name reflects that. A pale inner lip and the fine dark speckling over the cheek are more consistent than the body pattern.
The burrow is vertical, dug in sand that carries enough shell and rubble to hold a wall, and lined with fragments carried up in the mouth. The fish hangs in the entrance with the head and a little of the body clear and drops out of sight when a diver closes the distance, returning in stages once the movement stops. Ground of pure silt does not hold burrows, so the productive search is the coarser patches at the foot of a slope and the rubble margins of sand flats.
Males brood the egg mass in the mouth, rolling it forward and back to keep water moving through it, and cannot feed while they are holding it. Recorded from about 5 to 30 m through Indonesia and the Philippines. Below the level of the burrow the animals are hard to census, and published depth and abundance figures for the species are thin.
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.