Buries itself in silt with the pale chin left showing, which is how it is found.
A small scorpaenid to about 10 cm, mottled in brown, red and cream with scattered skin flaps, a steeply sloping face and a chin and throat that are conspicuously pale against the rest of the animal. It is the only fish of this build on soft sediment here with that pale underside, and it is the feature the name records.
Spends the day buried in silt with only the top of the head clear, which makes it one of the harder animals on a muck site to find and one of the easier ones to be shown twice, since it will hold the same patch for days. Hunts small crustaceans at night. Recorded from about 3 to 40 m. The dorsal spines are venomous. Guides here often show it beside the cockatoo waspfish for comparison — both are compressed, sail-finned ambush fish on soft bottoms — and the whiteface is the smaller, blunter one with the pale chin, where the cockatoo leans further over and has the longer snout.
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.
