Mushroom Coral Pipefish
One of the most unusual fishes among a zoo of amazing marine fishes in the Philippines is the mushroom coral pipefish. This fish is a relative of the seahorses, but in fact looks like a pale thin worm wiggling in-between the tentacles of a mushroom coral. Only when you look at it more closely do you see that it has a mouth and a pair of eyes like a fish, and a dangerous looking red line going through its eye.
The scientific name for this fish is Siokunichthys nigrolineatus named after Siocon Bay, just north of Zamboanga City in the map below, on the on the west coast of the Zamboanga peninsula. Dauin/Dumaguete, where I saw this fish recently is just a few 100 km to the north-east where the fish was initially found. The adult mushroom coral pipefish doesn’t leave its host coral, so the distribution throughout the southern-central Philippines must happen via larvae. As in all pipefishes and seahorses, the male fish carries the fertilized eggs in a pouch or attached to his belly, and only when the larvae hatch do they disperse over wider distances in the open ocean.
The mushroom coral pipefish is only known from Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. I had seen them a few times when I moved to Dauin in 2014, but not for a few years until my friend Matt found them on one dive site in the area, in one pair of mushroom corals. These pipefish have been there, in the same pair of adjacent corals, continuously for almost a year now.
As adults, the mushroom coral pipefish live exclusively on mushroom corals. These corals, the Fungiidae, are hard corals composed of only a single large polyp. That’s unusual, since most hard corals are colonies of many thousand often very small polyps. The mushroom coral polyps also feature rather large tentacles, and in-between these the pipefish hide. This complete link of the fish life history to an invertebrate host is called commensalism.
The amazing camouflage of the pipefish – they resemble the veins at the floor of the mushroom coral – is an adaptation which evolved very specifically for the fish to survive on these Fungiids. This evolution towards matching the feature of another animal is called co-evolution.
Please enjoy the mushroom coral pipefish video below! And if you’d like to learn more about camouflage and commensalism in fishes, please check out my new book, the Lives of Gobies, which is still looking for a quality publisher.
More Shroomy Videos
My mate Justin, the famous Critter Hunter of Dauin, has also made a video about the mushroom coral pipefish:
