All the Gobies of Bolinao

I had the pleasure of spending the last three summers at the Marine Laboratory of the University of the Philippines in Bolinao, Pangasinan province, Philippines. There I had the chance to concentrate on the biology of the gobies, fascinating little marine fishes, mostly bottom-dwelling, sometimes in a symbiosis with a shrimp, often really pretty. We did a few studies on the behavior of gobies, still in preparation, and we also surveyed the area for all goby species we could find. I just put out manuscript which details our survey of goby biodiversity on the bioRxiv preprint server. Enjoy the read!

We have quite a bit of supplementary material available for this manuscript, please check it all out: Below is a short clip of some of the footage I shot of the shrimp-associated gobies in Bolinao. This includes footage of Myersina lachneri, newly described for the Philippines.

 

This is an album on Flickr with all the photographs of gobies I took in the area. Enjoy!

I also created a project on iNaturalist including all the marine organisms in the Bolinao-Anda reef complex, including the gobies featured in our study. I am liking iNaturalist more and more, if used properly it can be citizen science at its best, with a voting system for the reliability of IDs and good mapping tools. There is a plugin to R too, to be able to use iNaturalist data in more sophisticated ways.