Walks across the sand on four free fin rays and flashes coloured pectorals when pushed.
A member of the stonefish family reaching about 25 cm, with a heavily rugose head, an upturned mouth and a body that is usually the colour of whatever sediment it is lying in — grey, brown, red or, occasionally, bright yellow. The lowest two rays of each pectoral fin are separate from the rest of the fin and from each other, and the fish uses these four free rays as legs, walking across the bottom in a slow deliberate crawl rather than swimming. That gait alone identifies the genus.
Spends the day buried to the eyes and hunts by ambush after dark. When persistently disturbed it spreads the pectoral fins, whose inner surfaces are marked in bold yellow, orange, white and black — a warning display, and the reason so many photographs show a fish that looks nothing like the buried lump a diver first found. Provoking that display is worth resisting; the dorsal spines are venomous and the sting is severe. Recorded from a metre or so down to about 40 m on soft bottoms across the western Pacific.
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.
