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changes all of that. It also gives every diver who photographs one a reason to log the sighting, because we still know almost nothing about how many of these fish are out there, or whether they are doing well or struggling. The hairy ghost pipefish is currently confirmed from the Coral Sea and the Great Barrier Reef, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Fiji and Tonga, with Tonga marking the eastern limit of its known range. Photographic records suggest depths between 10 and 30 metres, on outer reef walls and coral bommies with adjacent rubble: anywhere that dense, drifting clumps of filamentous macroalgae catch the current. It probably isn’t genuinely rare. It is well camouflaged and very small, and most divers swim straight past it. If you slow down on your next reef dive and start scanning the red algae (properly scanning, the way you would for a pygmy seahorse), you may well find one. And if you do, please photograph it and post it to iNaturalist. That is, quite literally, how this species was discovered. Sesame Workshop, the non-profit behind the show, gave the name its blessing with genuine delight. Our next goal (and we are only half joking) is to wangle an invitation to Sesame Street to meet the original Snuffleupagus. We feel we’ve earned it. Between us, we have described a number of new species over the years. David has even had a pipefish named after him. But this one is the best of the lot. This was David’s quarter-century hunt; he is the reason the species has a

Snuffleupagus fromVoli voli Fiji in 2012 photo credit by Mike Scotland

name at all. He recognised the fish on a single dive in 2002, identified it as something new from the photograph alone, and chased it across the Indo-Pacific for the better part of two decades. He named it after a children’s television character he’d loved since he was a kid, and somehow got Sesame Workshop on board. Snuffy was always going to be more than a fish for him. The rest is the part we got to do together: collecting the specimens at Saxon Reef in 2022, the morphological work, the analyses, the description. Twenty-five years from a hovering tuft of algae in Milne Bay to a name in the Journal of Fish Biology . We could not be more pleased to have got there together.

Snuffleupagus from Tawali PNG Mike Scotland showing larger female in the front with ventral fin brood chamber.

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DiveLogAustralasia #418 June ‘26

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