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29 January
Opistognathus cryos Su & Ho 2024   

Last week we stated that the clingfish Melanophorichthys priscillae is the first (and only) fish species named after a movie. This recently described species of jawfish from Taiwan also has a nomenclatural connection to the cinema.

Opistognathus cryos was discovered on a beach in the northern por­tion of Peng-hu, a group of small islands in the Taiwan Strait off western Tai­wan in the Pacific Ocean. The holotype had washed ashore, along with many other coral-reef fishes, frozen to death when a February 2022 cold snap hit Penghu. For this reason, the authors named the fish cryos, from the Greek krýos (κρύος), meaning cold or chilled. The authors also proposed the common name “Frozen Clingfish” for obvious reasons, but mentioned another, perhaps superfluous, reason as well.

“Frozen Clingfish” also refers to the 2013 animated Disney film “Frozen.”

Let it go, let it go
And I’ll rise like the break of dawn
Let it go, let it go
That perfect girl is gone
Here I stand in the light of day
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway

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22 January
Melanophorichthys priscillae Conway, Moore & Summers 2024   

Three fishes have been named after characters in movies: two from Star Wars: A New Hope (Romanogobio skywalkeri, Peckoltia greedoi) and one from a 2010 Japanese animated fantasy film The Secret World of Arrietty (Malthopsis arrietty). This newly described clingfish is, I believe, the first time a fish has been named not after a character in a movie, but the movie itself.

Melanophorichthys priscillae inhabits dense seagrass meadows in waters up to 15 m along the coast of Western Australia. It is named for the 1994 Australian road comedy film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which details the journey of three heroines (two drag queens and a transgender woman) as they travel across the Australian continent in a bus named Priscilla. The name, per the authors, alludes to the bright life colors of males. As a still (shown here) from the film indicates, the male characters are indeed brightly attired.

The proposed common name is Queen Grass Clingfish.

One could make the case that Melanophorichthys priscillae is not named after the film, but for the eponymous bus in the film. If that’s the case, I can say without hesitation that this would be the first fish species in the history of fishes to be named … after a bus.

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15 January
Cobitis beijingensis Sun & Zhao 2025

Every year we highlight the first-described new fish species of the New Year. For 2025 it is Cobitis beijingensis.

Cobitis is a genus of loaches (Cobitidae) found in temperate and subtropical waters from Europe and Northern Africa to Asia. ETYFish records 124 species and four currently valid subspecies in the genus. With the addition of C. beijingensis, the total is now 125 species (with more to be described). As the Latin suffix –ensis (from) suggests, C. beijingensis hails from Beijing, the capital city of China. You can read the original description here.

The generic name Cobitis is from kōbī́tis (κωβῖτις), an ancient Greek name for small fishes that bury in the bottom and/or are like a gudgeon or a goby. The name was first applied to loaches — for what is now known as Cobitis taenia Linnaeus 1758 — by the Renaissance scholar Rondelet in 1555.

According to Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes, 406 new species were described in 2024. By our unofficial count, 37.4% of these new species belong to these five families:

Nemacheilidae … 39 new species
Oxudercidae … 38 new species
Gobiidae … 31 new species
Trichomycteridae … 24 new species
Cyprinidae … 20 new species

These diverse families keep us very busy every year updating the ETYFish Project website and database. We don’t expect that to change in 2025.

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8 January
William N. Eschmeyer (1939–2024) and “Cofish”

William N. “Bill” Eschmeyer passed away peacefully on 30 December after a long illness. I wrote about Dr. Eschmeyer and his achievements when the “Name of the Week” celebrated his 80^th birthday in 2019 (11 Feb. entry). His obituary, prepared by his family, is presented in its entirety below. Today I would like to honor Dr. Eschmeyer and his magisterial “Catalog of Fishes” by solving a nomenclatural mystery of sorts: the origin and meaning of the common name “Cofish” for the monotypic genus Eschmeyer Poss & Springer 1983, the only member of the stonefish subfamily Eschmeyerinae.

Eschmeyer nexus is known from only one specimen, a mature female 41.3 mm SL, taken in 27-43 m from Ono-i-lau in the Lau Islands, Fiji. Stuart G. Poss and Victor G. Springer named the genus in honor of Dr. Eschmeyer for his contribution to the study of scorpaenid fishes. The specific name nexus is from the Latin nectere, to tie or connect, referring to a combination of features that suggest a close relationship to several groups of scorpaenoids. The genus was placed into its own family, Eschmeyeridae, by S. A. Mandrysta in 2001. The family is now considered a subfamily of the stonefish family Synanceiidae.

Poss & Springer did not propose a common name for Eschmeyer nexus. I first encountered the common name “Cofish” for the family in the fifth edition of Nelson’s Fishes of the World (2016). I immediately noticed that the name included what appears to be an acronym of the Catalog of Fishes, COF. Is this a tribute to Dr. Eschmeyer and, if so, who came up with it? I asked Mark V. H. Wilson, one of the authors of Fishes of the World, where he got the name. He said I was not the first person to ask him this question. In fact, a previous enquirer wondered if “Cofish” is a typo. If so, a typo of what? Dr. Wilson could not say for sure where he saw the name, but guessed that he consulted FishBase and used the common name found there.

I posed the same question to Stuart Poss, who co-described the genus in 1983. Neither he, nor his co-author, proposed the common name. It “sounds like an Internet-generated error,” Dr. Poss wrote me. “Cofish – a fish that is not quite a fish but rather a cofish.”

I asked FishBase about the name and, yes, someone associated with the site coined the name as a tribute to Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes. The person responsible asked that their identity not be revealed.

Note: The Wikipedia entry for Eschmeyer nexus says Mandrysta suggested the English common name “Cofish” in his 2001 monograph, citing The ETYFish Project as the source. This is incorrect. Mandrytsa did not propose any common names and we’ve never credited him with this one.

William N. Eschmeyer (1939–2024)

Bill Eschmeyer was born in 1939 in Knoxville, TN to Reuben and Ruth Eschmeyer. He spent his early years in Norris, TN where his father was the head of fisheries for the Tennessee Valley Authority, a major project of the New Deal. After Reuben suffered a fatal heart attack in 1955, Bill’s mother moved Bill and his two sisters to Maryland. Ruth raised her three children as a single mother, working full time to put all three of her children through college. Bill spent his undergrad years at the University of Michigan where he followed in his father’s footsteps to pursue a degree in marine biology. He went on to complete his doctorate at the University of Miami. In 1967, he married and moved to California, where he began his career with the California Academy of Sciences. He spent 40 years at the Academy as curator of fishes.

During his career, Bill co-wrote a popular book on fish, the Peterson Field Guide to Pacific Coast Fishes, and a total of 61 scholarly articles on fish taxonomy, but his true life’s work was creating the worldwide fish database known as the Catalog of Fishes, first published in 1990. It is difficult to underestimate the Catalog’s importance for Ichthyology, as it is the resource that everyone relies on in the field and is unique in being the only such database for vertebrate animals. For his work in systematics, Bill was awarded two lifetime achievement awards. The first was the Bleeker Award for Excellence in Indo-Pacific Ichthyology in 2009 for a “lifetime distinguished accomplishments and great contributions in the study of fish systematics in the Indo-Pacific region.” In 2019, he was awarded the Joseph S. Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award in Ichthyology from the American Academy of Ichthyologists and herpetologists. The California Academy of Sciences renamed the Catalog to Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes in 2019. 

Bill was especially proud that he visited every museum in the world that held a collection with type specimens (the original specimens used when describing new species). He traveled to 6 continents and well over 100 countries. He enjoyed sharing the world with his three children. He took his younger daughter on a 6-week research trip to Europe while she was in college, and later, he took all his children and their partners on several international adventures, including a memorable trip to Tahiti in 1999.

Outside of work, Bill was an avid golfer, and he even returned to Tennessee to live on a golf course for several years in the early 2000s before neuropathy in his hand forced him to give up golf for good. But the thing that he never wanted to give up was the Catalog of Fishes. In 2011, well after his official retirement, he moved to Gainesville, FL where the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida gave him an office and a computer and the title of research associate. He continued to work on keeping the Catalog updated until 2018, when his health challenges made the work too difficult. Colleagues continue to keep the Catalog up to date and it continues to be hosted by the California Academy of Sciences. 

Bill moved to Massachusetts in 2018 to spend his final years near his youngest child and his three grandchildren. He was honored to learn that his eldest granddaughter is interested in fisheries biology and spent the past summer studying salmonid diseases at the University of Maine. She was equally delighted to find her grandfather’s name referenced in a paper she was reading for her internship. 

Bill is survived by his two sisters, Barbara Richards and Jane Marrs; his children Lisa Eschmeyer and husband Mark Meehan; David Eschmeyer; and Lanea Tripp and husband Simon; as well as his three grandchildren Nora, Braden, and Elizabeth Tripp.

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1 January
Chromis abadhah Rocha, Pinheiro, Najeeb, Rocha & Shepherd 2024

In naming this new species of damselfish, the authors express a hope for the future that seems appropriate for this, the first day of 2025.

“We also hope that this species and its habitat remain perpetual.”

The specific name of the species — abadhah (pronounced aa-BAH-duh) — means “perpetual” in Dhiveli, the local language of the Maldives. The fish occurs in deep-sea coral reefs throughout the Maldivian Archipelago, often in areas with small crevices and caves located close to large numbers of sponges. The holotype was caught using a hand net at approximately 101 m below the water’s surface, in the mesophotic zone, where sunlight is limited.

The authors chose the name in recognition of the Rolex Perpetual Planet initiative, which funded the expedition that led to its discovery. The grant was awarded to the study’s lead author, Luiz Rocha, the Follett Chair of Ichthyology and Curator of Fishes at the California Academy of Sciences. The fish’s proposed English common name is Perpetual Chromis.

Despite being relatively unexplored and hard to reach, deep-sea coral reefs in the eastern Pacific, eastern Atlantic and Indian Ocean are far from pristine. Every time they dive there, Dr. Rocha and his team see the impact of human beings. Fishing lines. Nets. Ropes. Coral bleaching. Hence the authors’ “hope that this species and its habitat remain perpetual.”

Just so you know, Rolex’s Oyster Perpetual Deepsea watches start at $14,150. The 44 mm yellow-gold model sells for $54,200.

Happy New Year!