It’s Trimma meranyx
2011
In January 2011, about 10 years ago, my tech diving instructors Matt Reed and David Joyce and I were swimming along the wall of Monad Shoal, the site of the famous thresher shark encounters, near Malapascua in the Visayas region of the Philippines. We were about 60 meters deep, breathing a light trimix. I inspected the crevices and saw a small goby … definitely belonging to the genus Trimma, but I wasn’t sure which species it was. I took a photograph and we swam on, soon to be followed by a lengthy ascent with lots of deco stops.
This is the shot:
After returning to the surface, uploading the images from my camera, and dwelling over them with my fish ID books, I came to the conclusion that no, this species had not been scientifically described yet. I enjoyed the thrill of having seen a – most likely – undescribed species. We later wrote up our photographic observations into a goby-checklist of Malapascua and Monad:
… but we didn’t go back to the site where we found the mystery Trimma. It’s not easy to get to the spot, and in order to describe a new species one has to catch a specimen; we didn’t have a sampling permit, and back then I wasn’t in contact yet with experts who could properly describe a goby species, taking into account all the subtleties of its anatomy.
2021
I recently scanned Fishbase for gobies of the genus Trimma, and came across one which seemed oddly familiar:
It turns out, the goby we saw a decade earlier was described in a formal, taxonomic way, 3 years after I took the photograph above. When Matt, David and I saw it, it was genuinely unknown to science. Given that it’s small and lives in 60+ meters of water, I suspect that not many people have seen it before or after. Winterbottom et al. state: “Most specimens of this ‘twilight zone’ species are reported from the 70 m depth range (though have been collected as shallow as 45-55 m in the Lembeh Strait)”
Trimma meranyx, described by Winterbotton, Erdmann & Dita Cahyani in 2014, the “Day-night pygmy goby”.
The type specimen, the individual on which the species description is based was caught in 2013 in Indonesia, Sulawesi, Lembeh Strait, on the dive site “Nudi Retreat”.
The authors further state that “The species do not appear to school or aggregate as with many congeners, but rather are found individually in small caves and crevices, frequently quite deep into the interstices of the reef and only visible using a strong underwater flashlight. Specimens collected were found exclusively on deep reefs sheltered from wave exposure but nonetheless exposed to currents”, which is what I remember the site where we found it to be like as well: deep, on a wall, in a crevice.
Beautiful to see how much there is still to discover in the ocean!
