A slender rubble pipefish with red-brown bars and a spotted snout, usually in pairs.
A pipefish to about 16 cm, pale cream to pinkish with narrow reddish-brown bars set at irregular intervals along the body and rows of small red-brown spots over the snout and head. The snout is long and slender and the tail fin is small and rounded, often with a pale margin. It is one of several Corythoichthys on these coasts, and the snout markings are the working separation from the network pipefish: discrete spots in lines here, a continuous net there.
It lives on the substrate rather than in the water column, crawling slowly over rubble, sand and the base of hard ground, and it is normally found as a pair working the same few square metres. Males carry the eggs in rows on the underside of the trunk, with no closed pouch over them. Recorded from about 2 to 25 m.
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.