Known from two small reefs off Tasmania and from a population counted in tens rather than hundreds. Diving on it is restricted.
To 14 cm. A handfish: squat, sitting upright, with modified pectoral fins it uses as hands to walk across the bottom, and a lure on the snout. There are two colour forms, one bright red with bluish and white fin margins and one mottled yellowish to pink with darker spots and patches. The skin carries small flattened warts.
The spotted handfish and the warty handfish are the other Tasmanian handfishes. The red form is unmistakable; the mottled form is separated from the spotted handfish by its warty rather than spotted skin.
It walks rather than swims, on rock tops, in seaweed beds, on sand patches between rocks and on weedy sediment between about 1 and 20 m. Females lay clusters of thirty to sixty eggs among Caulerpa fronds or sea squirt stalks in spring and guard them until they hatch. There is no drifting larval stage at all, which is why the species cannot recolonise anywhere it has been lost from.
A visiting diver will not see this fish, and the site should say so rather than imply otherwise. The entire known range is two small patches of rocky reef in Frederick Henry Bay in southeast Tasmania, the sites are not published, and the area is under active management. It is critically endangered with fewer than 250 individuals left as of October 2025. Sixty-five captive-raised fish were released in October 2025, and in early 2024 twenty-five wild fish were taken into tanks to sit out a marine heatwave and returned in May.
The scientific name here has been corrected: the accepted genus is Thymichthys, not Sympterichthys.
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.