Vanuatu

This species is not traded for aquaria but is occasionally exported as bycatch among shipments of other species. It differs from congeners in that the outermost row of teeth are not enlarged plus the interorbital space and cheek below eye are not scaled. Butis spp. are largely nocturnal ambush predators with cryptic...

Type locality is given as 'Boleling, northern Bali, Indonesia' which appears to correspond to modern-day Buleleng, but this species is currently understood to have a patchy but wide distribution with a range stretching westwards from the Marquesas Islands (French Polynesia), throughout much of Vanuatu, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Palau, Fiji, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and most recently, southern mainland China...

Type locality is given as 'Stream at end of long narrow bay, Waigeo Island, Irian Jaya, Indonesia', with the species also known from rivers draining the northern slope of New Guinea as well as Halmahera Island (Indonesia), the Admiralty Islands (Papua New Guinea), the Bismarck Archipelago (Papua New Guinea), D'Entrecasteaux Islands (Papua New Guinea), Louisiade Archipelago (Papua New Guinea), Bougainville (Papua New Guinea), Vanuatu, and...

This species is not traded commercially at present and the specimen pictured above was brought back from northern Papua New Guinea by private collectors in 2008. It's diagnosable from other members in the genus by possession of 10 segmented rays in the second dorsal fin, males with filamentous spines in the firstandusually with 14 rays. Colour patterning in males is also distinctive (see 'Sexual Dimorphism'). The Gobiidae is the most speciose vert...