Seahorse head, pipefish body, prehensile tail; grips algae and hydroids at 6 cm long.
To about 6 cm, and intermediate in shape between the two families most divers know: the head is angled down from the body as a seahorse’s is, but the trunk is straighter and longer and the tail is prehensile and used to hold on. Brown to olive and mottled, with short fleshy appendages along the back and often enough algal growth on the body to blur the outline. It is taken for a juvenile seahorse, which has a more sharply angled head and a deeper, shorter trunk, and for the Lembeh pygmy pipedragon, Kyonemichthys rumengani, which is far thinner again, a thread rather than a body, and hangs vertically.
Algae, seagrass, hydroids and the tangle at the base of rubble slopes, between about 3 and 25 m, anchored by the tail and moving with the surge rather than against it. It is cryptic and largely stationary, and most records come from guides who know a patch of growth rather than from general searching, so the numbers say more about who was looking than about how common the animal is. Males brood in a pouch on the underside of the tail closed along the midline by two folds of skin, an arrangement between the open tail of the pipefishes and the sealed pouch of a seahorse.
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.