ABSTRACT
Oxudercine gobies, the mudskippers, are distributed broadly throughout tropical and subtropical coastal habitats of the Indo-West Pacific (IWP) and the eastern Atlantic. The distribution of oxudercine gobies is largely coincident with that of modern mangrove habitats except that mudskippers are absent from the western tropical Atlantic and eastern tropical Pacific. This chapter summarizes the biogeographic regions proposed for mangroves and mudskippers. It presents a revised classification of mudskipper areas based on updated distributional and taxonomic data. An understanding of the biogeography of the mudskippers requires a detailed description of species distributions and a preliminary proposal of their areas of endemism. The broad-scale patterns of species distribution of oxudercine gobies mirror those of mangrove plant communities, with species diversity higher in the IWP than in the Atlantic Ocean. Collectively, mangrove plants display a unimodal distribution pattern as their diversity decreases to the east and to the west of Southeast Asia.
