''Starksia spinipenis'', the phallic blenny, is a species of

labrisomid Labrisomids are small blennioids (blennies), percomorph marine fish belonging to the family Labrisomidae. Found mostly in the tropical Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, the family contains about 110 species in 15 genera. Stockier than the average bl ...

blenny native to the

Pacific The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

coast of

Mexico Mexico ( Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guate ...

from the

Gulf of California The Gulf of California ( es, Golfo de California), also known as the Sea of Cortés (''Mar de Cortés'') or Sea of Cortez, or less commonly as the Vermilion Sea (''Mar Bermejo''), is a marginal sea of the Pacific Ocean that separates the Baja C ...

Acapulco Acapulco de Juárez (), commonly called Acapulco ( , also , nah, Acapolco), is a city and major seaport in the state of Guerrero on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, south of Mexico City. Acapulco is located on a deep, semicircular bay and has ...

. It prefers shallow sandy areas with weed growth. This species can reach a length of TL. The specific name is a

compound noun A compound is a word composed of more than one free morpheme. The English language, like many others, uses compounds frequently. English compounds may be classified in several ways, such as the word classes or the semantic relationship of their ...

if ''spinis'' meaning "spine" and ''

penis A penis (plural ''penises'' or ''penes'' () is the primary sexual organ that male animals use to inseminate females (or hermaphrodites) during copulation. Such organs occur in many animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate, but males d ...

'', a reference to the first spine in the

anal fin Fins are distinctive anatomical features composed of bony spines or rays protruding from the body of a fish. They are covered with skin and joined together either in a webbed fashion, as seen in most bony fish, or similar to a flipper, as s ...

of the males which is elongated and free of the fin membrane and is modified as a copulatory organ, a characteristic of the genus ''

Starksia ''Starksia'' is a genus of labrisomid blennies native to the western Atlantic Ocean and the eastern Pacific Ocean. Their typical length is SL. The generic name honours the American ichthyologist Edwin Chapin Starks (1867-1932) of Stanford Un ...

''.

References

spinipenis Fish described in 1960 {{Labrisomidae-stub