True love: tiny Australian desert fish travel vast distances to find new mate

The 6cm long goby is an 'average swimmer' but can travel hundreds of kilometres through Australia's red centre in just a trickle of water

A trickle of water running over parched earth is all the encouragement the desert goby needs. The unassuming little fish, reckoned by researchers to be a poor to average swimmer, only needs a few centimetres of water to follow a rivulet from one isolated, muddy puddle to the next. In the desert rivers region on the southern edge of Lake Eyre in Australia's red centre, a few centimetres of water may be all it gets.

But their ability to move quickly and opportunistically when floodwaters hit has caught the attention of researchers.