A stiff, stick-like pipefish lying on open sand, easily walked past.
A long, rigid pipefish reaching about 40 cm, brown to grey with paler saddles and a head that is barely wider than the body, so that a fish lying on sand reads as a length of dead stick. The tail fin is small and dark and is often the only part that identifies which end is which — hence the common name, and the alternative “bend stick”, which describes the shallow curve the body usually holds.
Lies directly on open sand and silt rather than clinging to structure, sometimes half covered in sediment, and moves in slow glides using the dorsal fin alone. Pairs are usual and the two animals are commonly within a metre of each other. Males brood the eggs on the underside of the tail. Recorded from about 3 to 30 m. It is the sort of animal a diver swims over three times before a guide points at it, and once seen it is easy to photograph: it does not flee, and the difficulty is finding an angle that separates a brown stick from brown sand, which usually means getting low and using the eye as the point of focus.
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.