418 Dive Log Australasia JUNE 2026.pdf

Snuffleupagus from the Great Barrier Reef. photo credit Alison Smith

coral reef will give a fish biologist a certain sympathy for this. “I always said to Graham, if we can get these specimens, we’re going to name it after Mr Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street,” David recalls. The wager held for nearly two decades. Divers crack the case What eventually broke the deadlock wasn’t a museum expedition or a research grant. It was divers with cameras and an internet connection. From around 2005, photographs of a shaggy red ghost pipefish started appearing on iNaturalist and on Facebook groups like ‘GBR Macro Critters’ and ‘Ghost Pipefish’. Almost every poster labelled the fish as a hairy form of Solenostomus paegnius , the rough snout ghost pipefish. The labels were wrong. The photographs were gold. Records started arriving from further afield: Fijian divers from Somosomo Strait, divers at Matafonua Lodge in Tonga in

2015, two posts from New Caledonia in 2024. Every one of these observations sat mislabelled on iNaturalist or Facebook, and every one of them, once we looked at it properly, was the new species. The known range of the hairy ghost pipefish was put together almost entirely from photographs taken by recreational divers and posted online. Without those records, we’d still think this fish lived on a handful of Queensland reefs and Papua New Guinea. Thanks to them, we now know it ranges from the Coral Sea right out to Tonga. Two divers in particular changed the search. Aaron and Al Smith, a husband-and-wife dive team out of Cairns who know the local reefs the way most of us know our own backyards, had been photographing the hairy ghost pipefish on Saxon, Norman and Hastings reefs for years. When word reached David that the Smiths were finding the fish reliably, the hunt narrowed from ‘somewhere in the Indo-Pacific’ to a handful of GPS marks on the outer GBR. Aaron’s photograph of a

Snuffleupagus from the Great Barrier Reef. photo credit David Harasti.

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DiveLogAustralasia #418 June ‘26

www.divelog.net.au