The frogfish of river mouths and mangrove creeks, dark and carrying two eyespots.
A frogfish to about 13 cm, usually dark green-brown to blackish, sometimes with pale mottling and a scatter of small spots, and with skin that is finely spinulose rather than warty or hairy. It carries dark eyespots on the soft dorsal fin and on the tail, which give the species its name. The illicium is short and the esca a small simple tuft, so the lure is not what a record rests on here.
What separates this species in practice is where it lives. It is the frogfish of brackish water, found in river mouths, mangrove creeks, harbour margins and the silty shallows where fresh water runs into a bay, sitting among roots, rubbish, fallen wood and dead coral rather than out on clean sediment. It also occurs in fully marine rubble, but a frogfish taken in water of reduced salinity in this region is more likely to be this species than any other.
Recorded from the Indo-Malayan region east to the western Pacific, from the surface down to about 15 m. The ground it occupies is shallow, low in visibility and generally passed over on the way to somewhere else, so sightings are irregular and most come from shore entries and from jetty and river-mouth dives rather than from boat sites.
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.
