Eighteen millimeters, fully grown. The genus name has been read as true tiny, from the Latin for true and the Greek iota, the smallest letter, and when the group was first described its members were among the smallest vertebrates known.
There are now well over a hundred species in it, and most of them were named in the last thirty years. That is not because new ones keep arriving. It is because telling them apart takes counting fin rays and examining the pattern of sensory papillae on the head under a microscope, and nobody could do that from a photograph of a two-centimeter fish sitting in a hole. Whole species sat undescribed on well-studied reefs, in plain view, for decades.
This one carries a black spot ringed in yellow on the tail, which is the mark to look for, and it does not go far from wherever it has settled.
Divers pass hundreds of dwarfgobies on a reef and see none of them.
The genus. Eviota Jenkins 1903 - ev- (Latinization). ETYFish
The species. Eviota punyit Tornabene, Valdez & Erdmann 2016 - Honours Pulau Punyit. ETYFish
- under two centimeters, translucent
- black spot on the tail fin, ringed with yellow
- sits on coral or rubble and does not move far
- up to 1.8 cm
Why it's threatened
There are no known major threats.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
