A blunt-headed pipefish, 6 cm long, living down among the polyps of Galaxea corals.
A short, blunt-headed pipefish to about 6 cm with almost no snout: the head is rounded and the small mouth set at its tip, which is what pughead describes. The body is smooth and worm-like, brown, olive or yellowish with faint pale bars, the pectoral fins are absent in adults and the caudal fin is tiny. Nothing else in the family is shaped like it, so identification is not the problem. Detection is, because at rest between coral branches it reads as a strand of tissue rather than as a fish.
It lives among the branches and around the base of living stony corals, most consistently Galaxea, and slides down between the polyps when disturbed rather than swimming clear of the colony. Recorded from a few metres to about 20 m. Because it does not leave, a colony that holds one tends to keep holding one, and most sightings come from guides returning to a coral head they already know rather than from open searching. Males brood the eggs on the underside of the tail.
Finding one usually means holding on a single coral head and watching for movement between the polyps, which is a slower way to spend a dive than most muck searching and turns up nothing on the majority of heads.
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.