The most strongly patterned rhinopias, associated with crinoids and soft coral. Mainly recorded from Papua New Guinea.
The most distinctive of the three and the easiest to identify, if you are in the right ocean. Around 16 to 18 cm. The colour pattern is a reticulated network of elongate, black-margined pale lines over a yellowish or greenish ground — a maze rather than the rings of the weedy rhinopias or the plain field of Eschmeyer’s. Structurally: twelve to eighteen tentacles under the lower jaw, two to four below the eye, numerous distinct body tentacles, and long branched antler-like tentacles above the eye and behind the nostril, dark with yellow margins in life. The spiny dorsal membrane is not fleshy and the soft-ray margin is strongly notched, the dorsal spines are firm with sharply pointed tips, and it usually has strongly pointed lacrimal and suborbital spines that the other two lack. The caudal ray tips divide in two in adults and are unbranched in juveniles, which is unusually clean for a rhinopias character.
Between about 5 and 33 m, on coral slopes rather than muck, often sitting openly on bommies and walls and frequently among crinoids, which it appears to imitate. It walks and hops on its fins and is nocturnal. The important point for anyone identifying photographs: it is restricted to the Coral Sea and the waters around it — Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu and northeastern Australia. It does not occur in Indonesia or the Philippines, so a lacy rhinopias reported from Lembeh or Anilao is a weedy rhinopias that has been misnamed.
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.
