---
title: Ornate Pipefish (Halicampus macrorhynchus)
scientific_name: Halicampus macrorhynchus
common_name: Ornate Pipefish
taxon: Pipefishes
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-10-30T10:18:40.199Z
updated: 2026-08-15T11:40:41.577Z
tags: Ornate Pipefish, Halicampus macrorhynchus, Pipefishes, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/pipefishes/ornate-pipefish
---

# Ornate Pipefish (*Halicampus macrorhynchus*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Pipefishes (*Syngnathinae*)
- **Size:** up to 18 cm
- **Depth:** 3-25 m
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Rare
- **Habitat:** Rubble and sponge-covered slopes, often silty
- **Reproduction:** Brooder, Gonochoric
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- body covered in leafy skin appendages, especially along the back and snout
- color from red-brown to yellow, matching sponge and algae around it
- long snout with a fringe of flaps at its base
- length up to 18 cm

The most decorated pipefish here: eighteen centimeters (7 in) of fish under a coat of leafy skin flaps, red-brown or yellow, lying against sponge and weed on a silty slope.

The appendages do the same job as a scorpionfish's: they destroy the outline. A pipefish is already a stick, and a stick with leaves on it stops reading as an animal entirely - which matters for something that cannot swim away from anything.

It is a prize for macro photographers and a genuine rarity for everyone else, partly because it is uncommon and partly because it is unfindable unless it moves.

Like the rest of the family it feeds through a snout used as a pipette, taking one small crustacean at a time, hundreds a day. The strike is a pivot of the head and a suck, over in milliseconds, and it is the same mechanism that makes seahorses such efficient hunters - the two groups are the same family.

## Also known as

- **English:** Ornate Pipefish, Whiskered pipefish, Winged Pipefish
- **Italian:** Pesce ago ornato
- **Czech:** jehla dlouhorypá
- **Japanese:** タツウミヤッコ, Tatsumiyakko
- **Chinese:** 大吻海蠋魚, 大吻海蠋鱼, 巨吻海龍
- **FI:** Viiksikoruneula

## Scientific synonyms

- *Phanerotokeus gohari* Duncker, 1940

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/pipefishes/ornate-pipefish)*
*Updated: August 15, 2026*