A stout seahorse with short sharp spines, on rubble and sponge rather than on soft coral.
A seahorse to about 17 cm, heavier in the body than the common seahorse and armed with short sharp spines along the back and on the head, the coronet spines the longest of them. Colour runs from cream and pale yellow through mid-brown, usually with fine darker mottling and sometimes with pale saddles across the back. The snout is of medium length, shorter than the thorny seahorse’s and blunter, and the spines are shorter and stouter than that species’. Worn and older animals lose spine length, which makes the two harder to separate than the descriptions suggest.
It is a soft-bottom animal. Most records come from rubble, sponge and sand below about 10 m rather than from the shallow weed and coral where common and tigertail seahorses are found, and much of what is known about it comes from trawl bycatch rather than from divers. That also means it is met deeper than most seahorses on a muck slope, and usually as a single animal holding onto sponge or a lump of rubble rather than onto a holdfast a guide can return to.
The species is recorded across the Indo-West Pacific, with the Philippines and Indonesia well within its range. Like all seahorses it is listed on CITES Appendix II, and like the rest of the soft-bottom species it is taken in quantity as trawl bycatch, which is the main pressure on it.
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.