Fringed with skin flaps along the back so it reads as a piece of drifting weed.
A pipefish to about 18 cm carrying a series of leaf-shaped skin flaps along the back and sides, and a long snout with a fleshy appendage at the tip. Colour ranges from brown and olive to a strong red or orange, often blotched with white, and the flaps are the same colour as the body. A fish lying among weed is close to invisible; one out on clean silt is one of the more striking pipefish here.
Rests on the bottom or leans into rubble and weed and moves rarely, drifting with surge in the way of the leaf-mimicking waspfish. Solitary or in pairs. Males brood the eggs on the underside of the tail. Recorded from about 3 to 25 m on soft bottoms and mixed rubble. Older and popular sources use “ornate pipefish” for this species, which invites confusion with the ornate ghost pipefish Solenostomus paradoxus; the two are in different families and the ghost pipefish is the deeper-bodied animal with the fan-like fins.
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.