A seahorse of the seagrass and rubble, anchored by a tail that has no fin on it, holding its head at an angle to a body ringed in bony plates. It changes color to match its holdfast and grows skin filaments when the holdfast is fuzzy, which is why it is so rarely spotted by anyone not specifically looking.
The male is the one that gets pregnant, and it is a real pregnancy rather than a bag. The female deposits eggs into a pouch on his belly; the tissue inside embeds them, supplies oxygen, regulates salinity and feeds the embryos, and after two to four weeks he goes into labor and pumps out fully formed young. No other animal does it this way round.
Feeding is silent and fast. The long snout works as a pipette: the head snaps up and the prey is sucked in from a body length away, a movement that takes milliseconds and that a seahorse can repeat thousands of times a day because it has no stomach and digests continuously.
Whether this is a species of its own has been argued since 1933; some checklists sink it into the wider Indo-Pacific Hippocampus kuda, others keep it. What is not in doubt is that the seahorses of this sea are few, slow-moving, and worth leaving where they are.
- upright body ringed with bony plates, head held at an angle to it
- prehensile tail wrapped around a holdfast, no tail fin at all
- eyes move independently, snout used as a pipette
- length up to 14 cm
