Galápagos Damselfish

Galápagos Damselfish :: Azurina eupalama

Bad at Goodbyes :: Episode 075

On today’s show we learn about the Galápagos Damselfish, a critically endangered, possibly extinct marine fish native to the ocean waters of the Galápagos Islands, an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, a province of Ecuador, roughly 600 miles west of the South American Ecuadorian coast. Its scientific name is Azurina eupalama and it was first described in 1903.

(00:05) Intro(02:05) Species Information(23:33) Citations(25:41) Music(31:44) Pledge

For more information about conservation on the Galápagos Islands, please see the Galápagos Conservancy at https://www.galapagos.org.

Research for today’s show was compiled from:

Aguilar-Medrano, R., Frédérich, B., De Luna, E., Balart, E. F. "Patterns of morphological evolution of the cephalic region in damselfishes (Perciformes: Pomacentridae) of the Eastern Pacific". Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, Volume 102, Issue 3, March 2011, Pages 593–613. – https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2010.01586.xButler, Rhett Ayers. "Is the Galápagos damselfish extinct?" Mongabay, April 7, 2026. – https://news.mongabay.com/2026/04/is-the-galapagos-damselfish-extinct/Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment of the Galápagos Islands. 2011. Eds. I. Larrea and G. Di Carlo. WWF and Conservation International, USA – https://www.cbd.int/doc/lifeweb/Ecuador/images/ClimateChangeReport.pdfCominsky, E. 2020. "Azurina eupalama" (On-line), Animal Diversity Web. Accessed April 20, 2026. – https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Azurina_eupalama/Grove, J.S., Bensted-Smith, W., Brandt, M., Domínguez, O., Espinoza, E., Keith, I., Rivera, F.E., Suárez, J., Tapia, I. & Tirado-Sánchez, N. 2023. "Azurina eupalama". The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2023: e.T184017A217449660. – https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2023-1.RLTS.T184017A217449660.enGrove, J. S., & Victor, B. C. (2025). "Has climate change driven the Galapagos Damselfish, Azurina eupalama, to extinction?" Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation, 42, 7–14.. – https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14846312Grove, Jack. (1985). "Influence of the 1982/1983 El Niño event on the icthyofauna of the Galapagos islands". Tropical Ocean-Atmospheric Newsletter Vol.28 pp. 18-19. – https://www.google.com/books/edition/Tropical_Ocean_atmosphere_Newsletter/xR4eAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=RA24-PA18&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22ichthyofauna%20on%20the%20Gal%C3%A1pagos%22Heller, Edmund and Snodgrass, Robert Evans. (1903). "Papers from the Hopkins Stanford Galapagos expedition, 1898-1899. XV. New fishes." Proceedings of the Washington Academy of Sciences 5: 189-229. Washington, D.C: The Academy. – https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/17224271iNaturalist – https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=1.6818345&nelng=-89.2412769&swlat=-1.4112351&swlng=-92.0089666Kelly, J., Pan, Y., Menzer, A., Dong, H. 2023 "Hydrodynamics of body–body interactions in dense synchronous elongated fish schools". Physics of Fluids v. 35 (4): 041906. – https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0142950McCosker, John E., and Richard H. Rosenblatt. 2010. "The Fishes of the Galápagos Archipelago: An Update." Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, ser. 4, 61, Supplement II, no. 11: 167–95. – https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/63419300Parmentier, Eric, David Lecchini, and David A. Mann. 2016. "Sound Production in Damselfishes." In Biology of Damselfishes, edited by Bruno Frédérich and Eric Parmentier, 204–228. Boca Raton: CRC Press. – https://www.hawaii.edu/behavior/490E/Parmentier%20et%20al.%202010.%20Sound%20production%20in%20damselfishes.pdfRastoin-Laplane, E., Salinas-de-León, P., Goetze, J.S., Saunders, B.J., McKinley, S.J., Norris, C., Gosby, C., Mattingly, A., Garcia, R., Harvey, E.S. "Fluctuations of Galapagos mid-water and benthic reef fish populations during the 2015–16 ENSO". Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science, v. 294 (2023). – https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecss.2023.108523Simons, Eric. "The Fish We Never Knew: A Brief History