The first dorsal fin is drawn out into a tall filament held up over the burrow.
A shrimpgoby to about 13 cm, white to cream with five or six orange-brown bars across the body and fine orange spotting over the head. What separates it from the other barred Amblyeleotris is the first dorsal fin: the leading spines extend into a tall, narrow banner that the fish raises well above the body when it is settled and folds flat when it retreats. On a calm fish the banner is held up almost continuously, which makes the species recognisable from several metres away, further than the body pattern alone would allow.
It shares a burrow with an alpheid snapping shrimp on the same terms as every other shrimpgoby. The shrimp digs and maintains the tunnel and keeps an antenna in contact with the fish while it works at the entrance, and both go down when the fish signals. The ground it uses is coarser and deeper than that of the yellow shrimpgoby and the spotted shrimpgoby, usually from about 12 m down, at the foot of a slope or on sand flats away from the reef.
Approaching one is a matter of covering the last two or three metres slowly and from low down, because the fin goes flat before the fish drops and a raised banner in a photograph means the animal had not yet decided to leave. Recorded from Indonesia, the Philippines and southern Japan.
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.
