A very small stout pipefish with raised, spiny body ridges, sitting still in rubble.
A pipefish to about 6 cm, short and thick-set for the family, brown to olive with pale saddles and irregular darker marks. The body rings carry raised ridges tipped with short spines and low skin flaps, so the outline is rough rather than smooth and the animal reads as a piece of encrusted rubble at anything beyond half a metre. The snout is short and deep, unlike the long thin snouts of the pipefishes that work open sand.
It sits among coarse rubble, at the bases of sponges and corals and in the broken ground at the foot of a slope, and it moves very little. Feeding is on small crustaceans taken at close range from the surfaces immediately around it. Because it does not travel, an animal found on one dive can usually be found again on the same square metre.
Recorded across the tropical Indo-Pacific from a few metres to about 30 m. It is small, still and the colour of its background, and almost every record comes from a diver who was already stopped and looking hard at one patch of rubble for something else, which is why the difficulty here is set at the top of the scale despite a wide distribution.
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.