A joint team of Philippine and Japanese biologists recently announced the discovery of a new species of goby fish in Palawan.

Barely the size of a pinky finger, it was dubbed Lentipes palawanirufus — Latin for "red-headed Lentipes goby of Palawan" — for the distinctive coloration of the males of the species.

The newly discovered fish was found in a freshwater stream and is a distant cousin of other gobies common to the Philippines, including Gobius criniger (commonly known as "biya" in Tagalog, "bunog" in Ilocano, and "parog" in Waray) and Mystichthys luzonensis (commonly known as "sinarapan" and touted as the world's smallest edible fish). It is also related to the famous Pandaka pygmaea, which is endemic to Malabon and was once thought to be the world's smallest fish.

Surprisingly, genetic analysis of L. palawanirufus found it to be very closely related to two other newly-identified species, Lentipes kijimuna and Lentipes bunagaya — named after red-colored woodland spirits of Japanese legend — which were discovered over 2,000 kilometers away in Okinawa, Japan.

The researchers believe that the striking red coloration of the males of the various new Lentipes species may help in attracting mates. It is not yet clear, however, how the three closely-related new species came to be separated by such a vast distance.

"Lentipes kijimuna and L. bunagaya are rarely seen in Okinawa," explained lead researcher Dr. Ken Maeda of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in a press release. "So we think that these species we encountered here were born somewhere else in Southeast Asia and transported to Okinawa when they were larvae."

The findings, published on October 5 in the journal Systematics and Biodiversity, were a collaborative effort between scientists from the Western Philippines University College of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, and several Japanese universities.