Sits motionless on the sand propped on its pelvic fins and takes passing fish with a strike too fast to follow.
Cylindrical, blunt-snouted, with a wide mouth full of fine needle teeth and eyes set well forward for binocular vision along the line of the jaws. The body carries a row of dark, roughly diamond-shaped blotches along the flank over a mottled red, brown and cream ground that changes to match whatever it is lying on. The fish props itself on stiff pelvic fins with the head raised, which is the posture that gives it away once you know it.
It is an ambush predator and everything about it is arranged around one movement. It waits, sometimes half-buried with only the eyes and snout clear, and takes small fish passing overhead with a strike from a standing start. The teeth are not for chewing — they are backward-facing and the prey is swallowed whole and head-first.
Most divers swim over a dozen of these on any muck dive and log none. A lizardfish with a fish in its jaws is one of the better behavioural photographs available on black sand, and the animals that allow it are usually the first ones passed rather than the last. They are tolerant of a slow approach and will hold position through several frames, then move a metre and settle again.
Several Synodus species share the ground and are separated on fin ray counts and the pattern of the snout rather than on the general impression, so a photograph that does not show the head clearly is best logged as Synodus sp.
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.
