The bar through the eye is the point of this fish, and it is the most reused disguise in the sea.
A predator hunting by sight looks for an eye. It is the one part of a camouflaged animal that cannot be patterned away: round, dark, wet, and always in the same place relative to the mouth. So an enormous number of fish paint a dark stripe straight down through it, running from the top of the head to the jaw, which breaks the outline of the eye into a piece of a larger pattern and buys the animal the half second it needs. Butterflyfish do it, wrasse do it, and this small goby does it as plainly as anything on the reef.
The second mark is a small orange spot just above the pectoral fin base, which is what separates it from its near relatives.
It lives where the water is not clear: silty sand and thin seagrass in bays and estuaries, alone or in loose scattered groups, picking small animals and organic scraps out of the sediment. Undemanding, abundant, and almost never noticed.
The genus. Gnatholepis Bleeker 1874 - gnáthos (jaw) + lepís (scale). ETYFish
- dark vertical bar running down through the eye
- small orange spot just above the base of the pectoral fin
- pale body with rows of dark speckles along the flank
- alone or in loose groups on open silty sand
- up to 8.4 cm
