A slender brown pipefish of seagrass and rubble, common but almost never noticed.
To about 15 cm. Slender and elongate, with a long slender snout roughly half the length of the head. The body carries widely spaced narrow pale bars, and there are two dark stripes running back from the eye. Tan to greenish-brown, mottled on top.
Two other Caribbean pipefish are the confusion. The two dark stripes behind the eye and the pale bars identify this one; the whitenose pipefish has a conspicuously pale snout tip and a raised ridge on the head.
It lives mostly in shallow seagrass beds, and also on reef, in estuaries and on soft bottoms, between about 1 and 78 m. Records to well over 300 m exist and look like trawl outliers. The male carries the eggs in a pouch under his tail.
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.