The Reproductive Behavior in the Gobioid Fish, Pterogobius zonoleucus JORDAN et SNYDER

The gobioid fish, Pterogobius zonoleucus JORDAN et SNYDER, lives a gregarious swimminglife in its habitat, near rocky shore in inlet. The autors collected the fish with a set-net, and reared it in the Shimonoseki Aquarium from early summer to next spring in every year of 1957, 1958 and 1959. The captured fish lived a individual swimming-life in a glass-aquarium (30×60×36 cm), and lived a territorial bottom-life for the spawning-period only. The oviposition and fertilization ocurred in a shell-nest, lying on the aquarium-bottom. The authors observed the spawnings 16 times in the glass-aquarium for 3 spawningseasons, and detected 3 behavior-phases: pre-spawning behavior, spawning-behavior and post spawning behavior, in a course of spawning-events. They recoginized a remarkable variation in the behavior-patterns of every behavior-phase. The effectiveness of the nest for fertilization of gobioid fish-egg is discussed in this paper, and the observations that the male parent fish, guarding the deposited egg-mass in the nest, eat the own eggs after the nest is disturbed in some gobioid fishes, including P. zonoleucus, is noted