All right, everybody. This is Ellen Weatherford, and I'm here as usual with Just the Zoo of Us,

your favorite animal review podcast. And this week, I'm here with a new friend. This is Kelly Diamond.

And say hello, Kelly. Hello. So Kelly, you have a really interesting animal to talk about this week that I'm really excited about because I don't know anything about it.

And I doubt that a lot of our listeners do either because I feel like this is kind of a, kind of an unique little guy, right?

Sort of.

So goby fishes in general are actually like the most specious group of fishes in the whole world.

Wow.

Like there's over like 1,800 different species of them.

There's a bunch of these guys.

But most of them live in the ocean full time.

And like the group that I study are special because they actually climb waterfalls. And so

there's a much smaller number of them that do that. Um, but they're, they're still gobies and they

use their like sucker fins to climb waterfalls, which makes them really, really cool. That is really

cool. I love that. I'm enjoying the visual image it's giving me because

it's quite funny. But so before we get into these, you introduce them to me as waterfall

climbing gobies. Is that like the accepted common name for them? So that's like a description of

like a whole group of gobies that are technically, like their technical term would be like amphidromous which means that they are born in the freshwater but they grow up in the salt water in the ocean and then they go back to freshwater to live as adults and so it's that like transition between where they develop as babies and where they live as adults that allows them

to like climb waterfalls. And so there's groups of these species that have like independently

evolved the ability to climb waterfalls all over the world. So you can find different species of

waterfall climbing gobees in Hawaii, which is where I studied them in the tropics like Dominica and the

Caribbean.

You find them in Japan.

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