A small mottled scorpionfish of shallow rubble, wedged under a stone by day.
A small scorpionfish to about 10 cm, red-brown to grey-green, marbled and barred, with a large spined head, a deep pit behind the eyes and short skin flaps on the snout, above the eye and along the lower jaw. There is usually a dark bar across the base of the tail and a dark blotch on the spinous dorsal fin. Colour follows the ground, and animals on coralline rubble run pink and red while animals on dark volcanic rubble are grey and olive.
The habit is to wedge into a gap under rubble, into dead coral or into the base of a sponge and sit there through the day with only the head clear, coming out onto the rubble surface after dark. Feeding is on small crustaceans and fish taken by suction at very close range. It does not flush, and a fish that has been found will usually still be in the same gap at the end of a dive.
Recorded through the Indo-Pacific in shallow water, mostly inside 20 m. The small scorpionfishes of this ground, in Parascorpaena and in Scorpaenodes, are separated on head spine and scale characters that a photograph will not settle, so a record kept at the genus is often as far as a sighting will honestly go.
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.
