120 GOBIES OF THE PHILIPPINES 



thick; the teeth in bands of four to six rows in each jaw, the 

 outer row largest, no canines; the tongue rounded; the dorsals 

 far apart, both dorsals and anal short and comparatively low; 

 the caudal rounded and shorter than head; the ventrals very 

 short and rounded, forming a nearly circular, powerful, adhesive 

 disk, with a characteristic thick, bilobed or deeply crenate fre- 

 num ; no flaps on shoulder girdle ; no silklike rays on pectoral. 

 Dorsal VI or VII, 1-8 or 9 ; anal I, 7, 8, or 9. Branchiostegals 

 5 ; the isthmus broad, the gill openings rather narrow. 



This genus is remarkable among gobies for the enormous 

 size, comparatively speaking, of its eggs. A spawning female, 

 40 millimeters long, contained about 135 eggs, each from 1.5 

 to 2 millimeters in diameter. This is in marked contrast to 

 all other gobies I have examined, most of which lay a large num- 

 ber of very small eggs. 



This is a group of small, dull-colored, inconspicuous gobies, 

 scarcely ever attaining a length of over 65 millimeters. They 

 inhabit mountain creeks exclusively, living among stones in the 

 swiftest water; species few, one probably generally distributed 

 over Luzon and the Visayas, the others apparently confined to 

 central and northern Luzon. One species lives at an elevation 

 of 1,000 to 2,000 meters. The species are very close and might 

 with some reason be lumped together in a single, very variable 

 kind. Tukugobius philippinus can be regarded as the parent 

 stock, the others being comparatively recent offshoots still in 

 process of evolution, and not yet completely separated by ab- 

 solutely fixed characters. 



This genus is closely allied to Rhinogobius of authors, from 

 which it differs in the absence of canines and the absence of 

 scales on the breast and about the ventrals; from Aboma, to 

 which it is also close, it differs in the character of the spinous 

 dorsal, which may have either six or seven spines in the same 

 species, in the broad head with fat cheeks, and in the weaker 

 teeth; it likewise seems near to Bleeker's Hypogymnogobius, 

 but differs in scalation. If the first dorsal always had seven 

 spines, the species should be placed in Aboma, where I placed 

 the specimens first examined. Study of additional material 

 showed that this disposition was not tenable unless the diagnosis 

 of Aboma were altered which, in the absence of Mexican and 

 Japanese material for comparison, I did not feel justified in 

 doing. Generic type, T. carpenteri sp. nov. 



Tuku, a Tagalog word for lizard ; one of the species is called 

 tuku ng bia (lizard goby) by the Tagalogs. 



