A 7 cm pipefish with a blue lateral line and an outsized red tail, hanging in recesses.
A small pipefish, to about 7 cm, orange to reddish-brown with a bright blue line running from the snout back through the eye and along the flank, and a caudal fin that is large for the animal, red to blackish with white margins. The blue line and the outsized tail together identify it. Janss’ pipefish is twice the length and divided front-to-back rather than striped, and the Dunckerocampus pipefishes are ringed. How strongly the blue shows varies between populations, and in some fish it is reduced to a stripe on the head alone.
Crevices, undercuts, rubble and the gaps in coral heads from the shallows to about 30 m, usually in pairs and often hovering head-down inside a recess. It cleans, and small fish will come to a pair and hold still for it. Males brood the eggs in a single layer on the underside of the tail under low membranous flaps. The species is small, dark-backed and habitually in shadow, so it is under-recorded rather than genuinely scarce, and a torch angled into a recess turns up more of them than a visual sweep does.
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.