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Two-spotted goby

Gobiusculus flavescens

Pomatoschistus flavescens (Fabricius, 1779) · Gobiidae WoRMS 1526389

Reference photos

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A small, slender goby up to 6 cm, reddish to greenish brown, with a black spot at the base of the tail fin; males carry a second, smaller spot beneath the pectoral fin. Unlike other gobies it hovers in small, loose shoals in the water column among kelp and eelgrass rather than sitting on the bottom.

Depth

Intertidal pools and shallow water down to about 20 m

Size

Up to 6 cm total length

Habitat

Inshore among Laminaria kelp and Zostera seagrass beds and over seaweed-covered rocks, from intertidal pools into shallow water

Behaviour

Hovers in small, loose shoals in the water column instead of resting on the bottom; the male guards the eggs until they hatch

Diet

I eat

  • Small crustaceans: copepods, amphipods and mysids
  • Zooplankton, including planktonic copepods and arrow worms (chaetognaths); it is primarily a planktivore
  • Larvae of barnacles, mussels and polychaete worms

Eats me

  • Gadoid fish: cod, pollack, saithe and poor cod, which feed on it most heavily from July to December
  • Squid, which take it among the small fish in their prey

Where you'd find it

Found around most of Britain and Ireland, though less often in the Celtic Sea and the waters west of Ireland.

ChannelCeltic SeaNorth SeaIrish SeaW of IrelandW of Scotland
Often seenNow and thenWhere PEBL filmsBased on marine survey records (OBIS). Blank seas can mean nobody has looked there, not that the animal is absent.

Sources

Open-access references behind this page. Every statement on this page was read out of one of them; anything that could not be traced to a source was taken off the page rather than left standing. Each link was checked on the date shown, and confirmed then to be about this species.

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