Vanderhorstia mertensi

Description

Vanderhorstia mertensi, Mertens' shrimp goby or the slender shrimp goby, is a ray-finned fish species native to the Red Sea, Japan, Papua-New Guinea and the Great Barrier Reef. Male individuals can reach a length of 11 cm in total. In 2008 a specimen was collected in the Mediterranean Sea, in Gulf of Fethiye on the coast of southern Turkey, where it was found on sandy bottoms in the icnity of beds of sea grass such as Zostera spp., Posidonia oceanica and Cymodocea nodose in the burrows of the alpheid shrimps Alpheus glaber and Alpheus rapacida. It is thought that the gobies most likely entered the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal by Lessepsian migration from the Red Sea but the possibility of transportation in ships' ballst waters cannot be excluded. It was recorded off Israel in 2013, confirming that its origin was as a Lessepsian migrant. The specific name honours the German herpetologist Robert Mertens (1894-1975) the former director of the Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt,who the author, Klausewitz, learnt about the biological and ecological view of modern systematics and taxonomy.