Gobies

I often find that the smaller fishes can be a lot of fun to watch. It's hard to beat this family of six-spot sleeper gobies for cuteness value. These gobies live in the lagoons on white sand, and we found this family in the lagoon in Baros. Generally, you'll find two of them in a hole, but we were lucky to catch this whole group (according to one of the books we have, the juveniles form small groups).

The Six-spot Sleeper-goby is identified by its pale colour, blue spots on the cheeks and a small black tip on the dorsal fin, which you can see very clearly on the picture if you click on it to enlarge it. As you can see on the picture, their home is a hole in the sand under an object, like a shell or a rock or a piece of coral.

They tend to be quite shy, and dart back in their hole when you get near them, but if you just float quietly at the surface for a while without moving too much, they'll come back out to check out what's going on. They look like little sentries standing guard, with their head raised towards the camera. These guys were less than 10 cm long.

There are other types of gobies - I like the shrimp gobies, that live in symbiosis with - you guessed it - shrimps. I'm not sure we have pictures of these. I must have a look. They live together, and the shrimp does the digging, while the goby stands guard. You could watch them for hours.
I also like the White-barred Reef-goby. We have some nice pictures of these, that I'll post some other time.