418 Dive Log Australasia JUNE 2026.pdf

The Holy Grail of Ghost Pipefish By Graham Short and David Harasti A 25-year hunt across the Indo-Pacific ends on the Great Barrier Reef - with a nod to a shaggy Sesame Street icon

I t took twenty-five years, six trips to Papua New Guinea, a long-shot trip to the Solomon Islands, an army of recreational divers posting photographs online, and a museum drawer in Sydney that nobody had opened in nearly three decades. It ended, finally, with a high-five fifteen metres beneath the surface of the Great Barrier Reef. In May 2026, we formally described a new species of fish in the Journal of Fish Biology : Solenostomus snuffleupagus , the hairy ghost pipefish. The common name speaks for itself. The scientific name needs a little explaining, and so does the The story begins in 2002, off Tufi, Papua New Guinea, where David was photographing fishes for his book on the marine life of PNG. Diving along a coral wall, something inside a shadowy overhang caught his eye: what looked like a small clump of red filamentous algae drifting in the current. Except it wasn’t drifting. It was hovering. He fired off a few shots on his film camera and pressed on with the dive. When the film was developed back in Australia, the image confirmed what he’d suspected on the dive: a ghost pipefish of some kind, but one that didn’t match anything in the books. Shaggier than its relatives. Stockier. Deeper in the body. And no longer than a matchstick. That single frame began what would become a twenty-year side quest. David went back to Papua New Guinea six times looking for the fish and never saw it again. He flew to the Solomon Islands on the strength of a rumoured sighting and didn’t see it there either. Photographs surfaced occasionally in field guides (Rudie Kuiter’s 2000 seahorses-and-pipefishes guide carried one, mislabelled as Solenostomus halimeda ), and recreational divers were posting sightings online from 2005 onward, but no specimen was ever collected. Two specimens were also sitting, unrecognised, in the Australian Museum’s fish collection, collected in 1993 during a Far North Queensland expedition and overlooked for nearly thirty years. Those two specimens would eventually become the official reference material for the new species. Naming a creature you can’t catch Somewhere along the way, the fish picked up a nickname. With its long tubular snout, its dense covering of shaggy filaments, and its knack for being seen by some divers and never by others, it bore an unmistakable resemblance to a particular resident of Sesame Street : Mr Snuffleupagus, the shambling, mammoth-like character who, in the early years of the show, was Big Bird’s invisible best friend. The adults could never quite catch him in the act. Twenty years on a strange road that got us there. A tuft of algae that moved

David Harasti photographed this Snuffleupagas in Tufi 2002

Image a is the first specimen used to identify it.

Image b is a following specimen used for comparison. Image by G. Short.

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DiveLogAustralasia #418 June ‘26

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