Mimics a dead leaf on open sand, and moves like one. Venomous dorsal spines.
To about 15 cm, and the spine count identifies it instantly: seventeen or eighteen dorsal spines, against twelve in any of the scorpionfish here. The body is strongly compressed, the snout nearly vertical, and the dorsal fin rises from a point above the front edge of the eye and runs back as a continuous unnotched sail — that profile is the animal. There are two backward-pointing lacrimal spines and five on the preopercle. Colour runs cream to brown, reddish or yellowish, usually with a pale stripe over the forehead and snout, white blotches, and dark scribbles on the dorsal fin in adults. It carries skin cirri but nothing resembling the branched appendages of a rhinopias. Family placement is genuinely unsettled: most authorities put it in Tetrarogidae, some in an expanded Synanceiidae with the stonefish, and others as a subfamily of Scorpaenidae.
It rocks and sways with the surge, imitating a dead leaf or a piece of drifting debris, and it drifts rather than swims. Nocturnal, solitary or in pairs, feeding on small crustaceans. No skin shedding has been documented for it. Recorded from 1 to 78 m, though most records are shallower than 20, on sand, rubble, silt, weed and seagrass on sheltered inshore reef. On the venom: there is no case report for this genus, but a related waspfish has been shown to carry a lethal, haemolytic protein closely similar to stonefish toxin, which is the best evidence available for what a sting from one of these would involve.
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.
