Is this really a Molly Miller blenny?

[Biokabe]

So I bought this fish a while ago, it was labeled as a Biota Molly Miller blenny when I picked him up, but I've always had my doubts... and after seeing him a couple days ago, I realized he's gone through a bit of a color shift even since I picked him up, and he doesn't really look like a Molly Miller to my eye.

This is my fish:

And this is Biota's imagery for a Molly Miller:

Pretty much everything looks off to my eye. The face is wrong, the striping is wrong, the color is wrong. No "eyelashes." Although the coloration has shifted on the fish since I took that picture - he's now much darker, almost black, and seems to have developed some blue spots along his cheeks. I haven't been able to get a great picture of him lately, this is probably the best I have:

What prompted this was the thread about micro fishes and the study someone linked to about fish lifespans. In that article was this picture:

Which is an image of Asterropteryx semipunctata, and it looked far more like my fish than a Molly Miller.

So, have I been fraudulently claiming to have a Molly Miller blenny this whole time?

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

I agree with you, the face is different and no eyelashes. My gut tells me it is not.

 

[Baldyreef]

yeah I definitely agree aswell, most likely a starry goby

 

[christinna77]

I'd say you won the jackpot. Starry gobies are very rare, I've personally never even seen one in stock here in Canada, else I would've grabbed it. Beautiful fish.

 

[Biokabe]

I got a closer look at it when I got home - definitely a starry goby. He really came into himself as he got a bit older - when I first got him he was very drab and gray, and his spots just looked like white noise. The blue iridescence on the spots seems to develop later, as does the darkening. I wouldn't have picked him out as a starry goby when I saw him at the LFS.

Makes sense why he's never seemed to exhibit proper blennitude. Still a pretty interesting fish, definitely a rockskipper. Lots of similarity to my shrimp goby in terms of swimming behavior, mostly sticks to the rocks and the substrate, but really comes alive when there's food in the tank. A bit of the opposite to many other marine fish, where the juvenile stage tends to be more colorful and interesting than the adult. Here, the juvenile stage was nothing to write home about, but much more interesting as an adult.

And the face is totally goofy.