A pygmy of shallow seagrass rather than of coral, and one of the least often seen.
A pygmy seahorse of about 2 cm, pale cream to white with a fine dusting of pink or brown speckles, a short snout and a body that is smooth apart from low rounded tubercles. It is a free-living pygmy rather than a host-specific one, and it is separated from Hippocampus pontohi on the arrangement of those tubercles and on the trunk and tail ring counts — a distinction that is not reliably made underwater and is often not made in photographs either.
Described in 2003 from Lord Howe Island, where it lives in shallow seagrass, and reported since from scattered locations across the western Pacific including Indonesia. It holds by the tail to seagrass blades and fine algae in very shallow water, which is unusual for a pygmy and puts it in habitat most divers pass through on the way to somewhere else. Records are few, and the species is genuinely poorly known rather than merely hard to find. Where a guide knows a patch, the animal is usually still in it weeks later.
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.