English: True gobies; Gobies and their relatives.
Genera: 200, 2000 species; 7 families, Gobiidae.
Region: tropical Indo-West Pacific; well represented in temperate waters.
Habitat: benthic, or bottom-dwellers, burrowing; freshwater habitats on oceanic islands; small fish fauna in tropical reefs; marine, 10% freshwater.
Use: few are important as food; interest as aquarium fish.
ZoologyFish; lacking a gas bladder.
Size: relatively small, typically less than 10 cm, some under 1 cm, some to 30 cm.
Ecology: they are important prey species for cod, haddock, sea bass, flatfish; one of the most numerous groups of fishes.
Fins: pelvic fins fused, can be used as a suction device, to ascend rock faces alongside waterfalls.
Reproduction: spawn in the ocean, catadromous; they can be sequential hermaphrodites and numerous species are known to exhibit parental care.
Behaviour: mostly free living fishes; alone or in small schools; some form associations with invertebrates, especially in coral reefs; some are cleaner fish.
TaxonomyGobiiformes was previously considered a suborder of
Perciformes. The 5th Edition of the Fishes of the World rearranged the families within
Gobiiformes. Oxudercidae and the Gobiidae are split into two families, with the Oxudercidae containing the species formerly classified as the Gobiidae subfamilies Amblyopinae, Gobionellinae, Oxudercinae and Sicydiinae while merging the families Kraemeriidae, Microdesmidae, Ptereleotridae and Schindleriidae into the family Gobiidae, though no subfamilies within the Gobiidae were proposed.
Families Trichonotoidei
• Trichonotidae
Gobioidei
• Rhyacichthyidae: Loach-gobies
• Odontobutidae: freshwater sleepers, 22 species, 6 genera, eastern Asia
• Milyeringidae: 2 genera, cave fish.
• Eleotridae: Sleeper gobies, 26 genera, 126 species, freshwater, mangrove.
• Butidae: Sleeper gobies, Indo-Pacific, West Africa, 10 genera, 46 species.
• Thalasseleotrididae: 2 genera, marine gobies, temperate, Australia and New Zealand, 3 species.
• Oxudercidae: Gobionellidae, cosmopolitan, temperate and tropical, marine and freshwater, inshore, euryhaline areas with silt and sand substrates, 86 genera, 600 species, mudskippers.
• Gobionellidae
• Gobiidae