A seagrass pipefish with no tail fin and a prehensile tail it uses to grip blades.
To about 29 cm, green to brown, the body flattened and angular with raised ridges along its length and a long straight snout. The useful character is at the other end: there is no caudal fin at all, and the tail tapers to a point and is prehensile, which no other large pipefish here has. The Trachyrhamphus pipefishes are the other stiff, stick-shaped animals on these coasts, but both of those keep a small tail fin and lie out on open sand rather than gripping vegetation. Colour tracks the weed, so a fish among green blades is green and one in dead algae is brown.
Seagrass beds, algal flats, weedy shallow rubble and drifting weed at the surface, from the shallows to about 15 m. It holds itself among the blades with the tail wrapped around one of them, usually oriented with the grass rather than across it, and it is more a seagrass animal than a muck animal: it turns up at these destinations where a bed sits alongside a slope. Males carry the eggs in rows on the underside of the tail with nothing covering them.
The name double-ended pipefish is used for this species in some references and for Trachyrhamphus bicoarctatus in others, so an unillustrated record under that name is worth checking before it is taken to mean either.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
