FishCommonVisible while snorkeling

Steinitz' prawn-goby

Amblyeleotris steinitzi

The sea's strangest flat-share agreement: Steinitz' prawn-goby stands guard while its near-blind shrimp digs their shared home.

Photo: iNaturalist – (c) Francois Libert, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by Francois Libert

Steinitz' prawn-goby (Amblyeleotris steinitzi) is a slender, whitish little fish marked with four or five broad brownish crossbars. It lives on sandy bottoms, but in a very particular way: it spends its life sharing a burrow with a pistol shrimp (an Alpheus species). It is named after Heinz Steinitz, the renowned Israeli marine biologist and pioneering researcher of Red Sea life.

The division of labour is ingenious: the nearly blind shrimp bulldozes and renovates the shared tunnel day and night, all the while keeping one antenna resting on the goby's tail. The sharp-eyed fish stands guard at the entrance – at the first sign of danger it flicks its tail, and both flatmates vanish into the hole in an instant. In return, the goby gets a ready-built home and even picks tiny invertebrates out of the rubble the shrimp excavates.

Around Hurghada you will find it on almost any sand plateau between the reefs from about 3 metres down – you just have to slow down. Spot the little burrow openings dotting the sand, each with a hovering goby out front, then inch towards them centimetre by centimetre above the bottom and watch the whole double act unfold: one movement too fast, and the show ends in a puff of sand.

Did you know?

The shrimp and the goby live in a literal permanent handshake: one of the shrimp's antennae always rests on the fish's tail, and the goby signals "all clear" or "danger" with a refined code of tail flicks – Morse code by touch.

Where can you meet it?

A species of sand plateaus and lagoons: you can see their burrows by the dozen in the Shaab Sabina shallows, the sandy bay of Abu Hashish and on the inner plateau of El Fanadir.

Frequently asked questions

In shallow sandy lagoons yes, for example at Shaab Sabina – though from the surface you will mostly see just the goby. The real show comes on scuba, hovering low over the sand until the shrimp ventures out to push another load of rubble.

The goby's eyesight is excellent, and it sounds the alarm at any sudden movement or bubble noise. The trick: stop a few metres away, get low over the bottom and creep forward slowly – within a minute or two both flatmates will pop back out.

Not to you – the famous "pistol shot" is used to stun tiny prey and warn off rivals, and your fingers are not on the menu. You can hear it though: part of the reef's constant crackling soundtrack is their doing.