Seahorses, pygmy seahorses, pipefish and pipehorses, together with the ghost pipefish, which belong to a different family but are found the same way. Small, slow, held in place by a prehensile tail or by a matching background, and almost all of them found by searching a host rather than by covering ground.
The full-sized seahorses hold one holdfast for weeks at a time, which is why a guide who has one will go back to it: the common seahorse on open silt, the thorny seahorse on silt and sponge, the tigertail out on the sponges after dark. The pygmies are host animals and are found by learning the host. Bargibant's lives only on Muricella sea fans, matching the tubercles as well as the colour; Denise's is smaller, smoother, on several gorgonian genera and usually deeper; Pontoh's is free-living among hydroids and algae on shallow slopes. Satomi's, at fourteen millimetres, is the smallest seahorse described and sits at the edge of what a torch and a dioptre will resolve.
The pipefish are the commoner half of the group and the half most often passed over. The network, messmate and Schultz's pipefish work rubble in pairs through the day; the banded and yellow-banded species hang in recesses and work as cleaners; the double-ended and long-nosed pipefish lie on open sand looking like sticks and are separated mainly on snout length. Two of them live inside a coral rather than on the ground: Braun's pughead pipefish down among the polyps of Galaxea, and the mushroom coral pipefish in clusters among the tentacles of a single mushroom coral.
The ghost pipefish are seasonal. They drift in as juveniles, settle head-down against crinoids, sea whips, seagrass or Halimeda algae, and are usually in pairs. The Halimeda species is normally found by moving the algae rather than by seeing the fish.
Every one has a page. They are shown as a list rather than as pictures because nothing has been photographed or logged for them yet, and a species with nothing behind it should not sit in front of one that has.
How many of the 53 carry a record at each destination. A species usually carries several, so these do not add up to 53.
All 1316 species in one index, with filters for destination, rarity and hazard.
