A short banded pipefish of rubble and coral, smaller and stouter than the messmate pipefishes.
A small pipefish to about 8 cm, pale cream to pinkish with a series of narrow brown bands across the body and fine red and white markings over the snout and the top of the head. It is shorter and proportionally deeper in the body than the messmate and network pipefishes it shares ground with, and the snout is short for the family. The tail fin is small and rounded and often carries a dark centre with a pale margin.
It works over rubble, dead coral and encrusted rock rather than over open sand, moving in short runs with the body held close to the surface and pausing with the head raised. Feeding is on very small crustaceans picked one at a time from the substrate, and the fish covers ground slowly enough that a pair can be followed for the length of a dive.
Males carry the eggs on the underside of the tail, in a shallow pouch formed by two folds of skin rather than in the closed pouch of a seahorse, so the developing eggs are visible from below. Recorded from a few metres to about 30 m in the western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean. The species is easily passed over as a juvenile of one of the larger Corythoichthys, and the short snout and the banded rather than mottled pattern are the separation.
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.