It is the size of a walnut. Six centimeters of lumpy pink fish sitting among sponges doing nothing at all, with a fishing rod folded flat against its forehead and a lure made of a tuft of long filaments.
It walks rather than swims. The pectoral fins are jointed like limbs and the fish steps across the bottom on them, slowly, one side and then the other, and when it has to cross open ground it uses a second gait that looks like a stumbling gallop. The gill openings sit behind the fins as small round holes, so it can also jet water backward and shove itself forward without moving anything visible.
The skin is worth knowing about. It is covered in tiny spinules and has no scales, and periodically the whole outer layer is shed in one piece, taking with it the algae, hydroids and silt that have settled on a fish that never moves. An animal whose survival depends on looking like part of the bottom still cannot afford to actually become part of it.
Finding one is mostly luck and a good guide. At six centimeters, pink among pink sponges, motionless, it is one of the harder animals to see on a reef where everything else is trying to be noticed.
- round bulky body, pink to dull red, covered in small spinules
- lure made of a tuft of long filaments on a short rod
- pectoral fins built like hands, used to walk
- tiny, up to 6 cm
