A long, rigid pipehorse of deeper soft bottoms, usually found only when it is brought up in a net rather than on a dive.
To about 42 cm. A long rigid ridged body, pale or straw-coloured, with no prehensile tail. The male carries the eggs on an open patch under his tail rather than in a closed pouch.
This entry carries a real problem and it is better stated than hidden. The Australian animal is not this species. Hardwicke’s pipehorse was described from China and is a northern hemisphere fish; the Australian material was long identified as it, and both morphological work and DNA barcoding now show that Australian animals are an undescribed species. It is sometimes called the pallid pipehorse. Two other pipehorses share the eastern Australian coast.
It is also not a species a diver will see. The Australian animal lives between about 16 and 190 m on the continental shelf and is known chiefly from prawn trawl bycatch. It is listed as data deficient, and the main pressures on it are that bycatch and the dried pipehorse trade to Hong Kong and Taiwan. Pipehorses are not on CITES, which covers only the true seahorses.
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.