Spends its whole life on one wire coral, and clears a bare patch to lay eggs on.
A goby to about 3.5 cm, the body almost entirely transparent with a brown-grey stripe along the spine and a pair of dark saddles, so that on a whip coral the visible parts are the eyes, the gut and a shadow. The pelvic fins are fused into a sucking disc, as in all gobies, and are used here to grip the stem. Bryaninops natans, on this list as the pink-eye goby, hovers above branching coral instead of perching and has a pink-red eye.
An obligate associate of the wire corals Cirrhipathes, usually as a pair on one colony, spending its entire adult life on that single stem. The pair scrapes the coral’s tissue from a short section to expose the bare skeleton and lays its eggs directly on the cleared patch, guarding them there — a small, permanent, visible alteration to the host. The same whips carry Pontonides shrimps and the xeno crab. Recorded from about 5 m to beyond 40. It slides round to the far side of the whip as a diver closes, so the approach is a slow circle rather than a straight line.
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.
