Pairs with a snapping shrimp in a shared burrow; the male carries a long first dorsal filament.
Described in 2001 from the Ryukyu Islands and since found across the western Pacific, reaching about 5 cm. The body is white, crossed by four to five broad oblique bars of orange-red that run forward and down, and the snout carries the same colour. The first dorsal fin is much the taller of the two, and in males its leading spine is drawn out into a filament longer than the head. No other shrimpgoby in the region combines the white ground, red-orange oblique barring and that filament; Stonogobiops nematodes, which shares the burrow-sharing habit and the elongated spine, has a yellow head and black bars set at a steeper angle.
Lives in an obligate partnership with the snapping shrimp Alpheus randalli, which digs and maintains the burrow while the goby watches from the entrance and signals with its tail when it retreats. Almost always in pairs, one male and one female, hovering a few centimetres above the hole. Recorded between roughly 15 and 40 m on clean coarse sand and shell rubble, usually deeper than the commoner shrimpgobies and often on the lower part of a slope. The pair drops into the burrow at the first sign of pressure and takes several minutes to reappear, so an approach made slowly from a distance is worth more than a fast one.
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.
