An armoured, flattened fish that walks rather than swims, usually in pairs on fine sand.
To about 10 cm, and structurally unlike anything else on the sand: the body is short, flattened and completely encased in fused bony plates, with eight mobile rings in the tail, a long flattened rostrum, and large horizontally held wing-like pectoral fins. It crawls on finger-like pelvic fins rather than swimming. Colour is highly variable and it is extremely well camouflaged as shell fragments and rubble, so it is usually found by movement. Males show broad pale blue and white margins to the pectorals, which they flash when disturbed. The confusion is with the other seamoths, which are longer-bodied, and — more often — with a piece of debris.
Two findings from the one substantial field study are worth carrying. Over ninety-five per cent of animals were found in pairs, with close pair-bonding, which is about as strong a case for monogamy as exists for any fish here; pairs spawned repeatedly at dusk and the eggs are pelagic, hatching in a day or so. And the animal sheds its skin whole, every one to five days, apparently with a rapid jump. That makes sense for a slow, armoured, permanently sediment-bound fish, which would otherwise foul with algae and epifauna. It feeds by protruding its mouth and taking small crustaceans and worms from the sediment surface. Recorded from 3 to 91 m; the depth range in the databases, which favours 35 to 90 m, sits oddly against the shallow muck sites where divers find it routinely, and probably reflects where the trawl records came from.
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.