A slender pipefish that lies among seagrass blades and is seen only when it moves. Named for the rows of spots along the body.
Between about 25 and 27 cm. Long and thin, usually green, with obvious black spots along the upper surface. Breeding females develop a prominent orange band along the upper side.
The wide-bodied pipefish is the confusion and there is a precise structural check: where the dorsal fin starts. On this species it starts over the eleventh to thirteenth body ring; on the wide-bodied pipefish it starts over the fifth to seventh. A third species, red and living deeper, was described from Botany Bay in 2020.
It lives in seagrass beds and weedy rocky reef in shallow water, generally above about 10 m, clinging to fronds with a nearly prehensile tail, and it is also found offshore in floating weed. It eats copepods and mysid shrimp and lives about a year. The male carries the eggs.
It occurs from southern Queensland round to southwestern Australia, including Tasmania, and also in New Zealand. It is a temperate fish, not a Great Barrier Reef one.
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.