The commonest shrimpgoby on this coast, and the one named for the man who built the place where most of what we know about this coast was worked out.
Heinz Steinitz founded the marine laboratory at Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba, and spent his life on the fauna of the northern 🌊 Red Sea. The lab still stands, the fish still lives on the sand in front of it, and the species carries his name because it was described from there.
The burrow is not a fixed address. The shrimp rebuilds continuously, and the entrance the pair used yesterday can be eighty centimeters from the one they use today, which is why a patch of sand that looked settled on one dive looks rearranged on the next. The goby itself sometimes opens a new doorway by simply pushing up through the sand from inside.
It eats what the shrimp's digging turns up, and swallows sediment to strain the rest out. Neighbors matter: a goby harassed by the one next door will have the entrance moved, and a goby ready to breed moves toward a burrow of the opposite sex.
The genus. Amblyeleotris Bleeker 1874 - amblýs (blunt). ETYFish
- white body with about five wide red-brown bands
- fine pale yellow lines between the bands, orange spots on the dorsal fin
- eyes set high and protruding
- at a burrow mouth, with a snapping shrimp bulldozing sand out behind it
- up to 13 cm
