This card is a taxonomic argument with a fish in the middle of it.
The animal was described from Suez in 1940 and named for it. The regional guide still treats it as a good species, brown with pale dots, reaching about twenty-two centimeters, and records it from this sea east to 🇵🇰 Pakistan. WoRMS does not: it makes the name a junior synonym of Hippocampus kelloggi, a much larger Indo-Pacific seahorse. FishBase keeps it separate again. Three authorities, three answers, and no way to settle it from a photograph.
What makes that more than a filing problem is that the 🌊 Red Sea has a second smooth-bodied seahorse, long called Hippocampus fuscus and now folded into Hippocampus kuda, which lives in the same shallow weedy sand and looks much the same. Most smooth seahorses photographed on this coast turn out to belong there rather than here, which is why this card has no pictures on it: the ones it used to carry were moved to the other card once the animals in them were measured against the spiny Jayakar's seahorse beside them.
So the honest description is a short one. A seahorse of seagrass and rubble, larger than the local kuda, without sharp spines, anchored by a tail that has no fin on it. Everything else worth saying about how a seahorse lives is on the pages of its two relatives here, and both of those animals are easier to find.
If you photograph a smooth seahorse in this sea, the useful measurements are its length and the number of body rings. That is what would settle which of the two it is.
- 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
