Elacatinus Jordan

Ricardo Z. P. Guimarães, Joao Luiz Gasparini & Luiz A. Rocha, 2004, A new cleaner goby of the genus Elacatinus (Teleostei: Gobiidae), from Trindade Island, off Brazil., Zootaxa 770, pp. 1-8 : 2

[[ Genus Elacatinus Jordan ]]

Gobies of the tropical New World genus Elacatinus Jordan , the neon gobies, are smallsized reef inhabitants, which are typically brightly colored and engage in cleaning symbiosis with larger fishes and invertebrates (Colin 1975; Johnson 1982; Pezold 1993).

The group is represented by five species in the eastern Pacific (Bussing 1990), 13 in the western North Atlantic ( Böhlke & Robins 1968; Colin, 2002) and two in the western South Atlantic: Elacatinus figaro Sazima et al. from the Brazilian coast (Sazima et al. 1996) and Elacatinus randalli ( Boehlke & Robins) from Fernando de Noronha Archipelago (Sazima & Moura, 2000). During recent field trips to Trindade Island, lying some 1160 km off the eastern Brazilian coast, we collected a third western south Atlantic species of the genus, which is described herein as new.