Long tufts above the eyes and a habit of sitting motionless in algae on silt.
To about 12 cm. Two characters do the work. The tentacles above the eye and behind the nostril are very long, exceeding the diameter of the eye — the shaggy look that makes the animal photogenic — and the dorsal spines are flexible, bending under light pressure, which is unusual and diagnostic. The snout is short, there are numerous tentacles over the trunk and fins, and there is no distinct black blotch on the soft dorsal. Colour is mottled blackish, red, pink or yellow and changes. The genus was revised in 2015, which recognised four species and absorbed an Australian name that had been sitting in Rhinopias, so photographic records from before then may not all be this species.
Solitary, sitting motionless on mud, sand and weed beds and engulfing prey with a sudden expansion of the mouth. No rocking, swaying or skin shedding has been documented for it, unlike the leaf scorpionfish. Recorded between about 3 and 43 m on soft bottoms and weed, across the Indo-West Pacific with a confirmed record from the Red Sea, and described in that paper as widespread but very rare. On the venom: the databases contradict each other outright, one coding the species harmless and one describing envenomation as potentially fatal. Neither is a real assessment. Nothing species-specific has been published, and the defensible position is the one that holds for the whole family — a painful sting with possible systemic effects, no recorded fatality attributable to this species, and hot water immersion as the standard first aid on the grounds that the venom is heat-labile, though there are no controlled trials behind that 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.