The Return of the Convict Engineer Blenny Goby
I recently got some footage of Pholidichthys leucotaenia, the convict/engineer blenny/goby, which is neither a goby nor a blenny, but resides in its own, separate family of reef fishes, most closely related to the freshwater Cichlids. The new footage is from Apo island, and shows a school of juveniles, under our dive boat:
This is a previous blog post I had written about the curious evolutionary history of this fish:
And this is an interesting blog post from an aquarium page I found about this fish. The aquarium people often have a lot of in-depth knowledge about fishes, with a focus on the right food and water parameters/tank design. It’s great to observe fishes in their natural environments as a scuba diver, but observing a fish in a tank in your living room, every day, breeds a different type of familiarity. To me, these two types of knowledge are often nicely complimentary:
This is a previous video I shot of Pholidichthys leucotaenia, featuring an unusual sighting of a young adult, out of its burrow:
While the adult looks like a blunt-headed eel, the juvenile engineer convict goby-blennies mimic the widespread venomous striped eel catfish. In a collaboration with my friend Paul he sand about the catfish to footage I had shot of this species:
