A bright yellow goby that lives inside discarded bottles, cans and shells on open sand.
A stubby goby of about 2.5 cm, uniformly bright chrome yellow with no bars, spots or markings of any kind, and with a blunt, rounded head that gives it a faintly comic profile. The colour is unvarying between individuals and there is nothing else of this shape and shade on a silty slope, so identification is immediate. It is one of the small number of muck species whose distribution has almost certainly been extended by rubbish: it needs a hard-walled cavity of the right size, and bottles, drink cans, lengths of pipe and discarded shells all serve.
Usually found in pairs, occupying a single container that both defend, with eggs laid on the inner surface and guarded by the male. Where a site has accumulated bottles it is common to find several occupied within a few metres of one another. Recorded from about 5 to 35 m on soft bottoms. The fish will retreat inside as a diver settles and then come back to the opening within seconds, so it is one of the easier small gobies to photograph — the difficulty is the container, not the animal.
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.
