A smooth-skinned frogfish with the rear fins bound into the body and almost no lure.
A small frogfish to about 10 cm with skin that is smooth and loose rather than warty, hairy or granular, and without the filaments and skin flaps that break up the outline of the larger species. Loose folds of skin envelop the bases of the dorsal and anal fins and run back to the tail, so the rear of the animal reads as one continuous surface rather than as separate fins. The illicium is very short and the esca small, and neither is usually visible in a photograph, so the lure carries none of the identification here. Colour runs brown, olive, dull orange and purplish grey, plain or faintly blotched.
It wedges into rubble, under plates of dead coral, into the folds of sponges and among algae, and it is more inclined to crawl than to sit in the open. The female broods rather than releasing eggs into the plankton: the caudal, dorsal and anal fins are folded around the egg mass and the clutch is carried until the young hatch, so the pelagic stage that other frogfishes pass through in open water does not occur.
Recorded from the Indo-West Pacific from a few metres to about 30 m. Records are thin, and some of that is genuine scarcity and some is that a plain brown frogfish with no lure showing and no obvious texture is easily left unrecorded or entered as a juvenile of something else.
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.
