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Common goby

Pomatoschistus microps

Pomatoschistus microps (Krøyer, 1838) · Gobiidae WoRMS 126927

Reference photos

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Once confused with the sand goby, but the common goby carries a dark mark at the top of the base of the pectoral fin. It tolerates a wide range of salinity and prefers low-salinity water, so it is abundant in estuaries, saltmarshes and intertidal pools all round the British and Irish coasts, usually in under a metre of water.

Depth

0 to 12 m, but normally in less than 1 m of water

Size

Up to 9 cm, and to 6.4 cm on British coasts; males mature at about 3 to 4 cm

Habitat

Tide pools, estuaries, saltmarshes and brackish lagoons, over bare mud or sand and among dense vegetation

Behaviour

Bottom-living; burrows to survive low water and escape predators, and males guard and fan eggs laid inside an empty bivalve shell

Diet

I eat

  • Amphipods, isopods, polychaete worms and chironomid larvae taken from the surface of the sediment
  • Epibenthic meiofauna in rock pools, mainly harpacticoid copepods and small amphipods
  • Juveniles feed largely on interstitial copepods

Eats me

  • An important food source for larger fish, from tub gurnard and five-bearded rockling to twaite shad and sole
  • An important food source for fish-eating birds such as great crested grebe and goosander
  • Freshwater fish such as ruffe also take it; it lives in the sea and in brackish water and migrates into the limnetic sections of rivers

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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