The Return of the Mushroom Coral Pipefish

I was lucky enough to get some new footage of the rare and unusual mushroom coral pipefish. The interesting aspect of finding this fish again is that my mate Matt discovered the newly settled fish in March 2020, just before the pandemic hit us. Hence they are at least 17 months old, which seems a long life for such a small animal – the smaller an animal, the shorter it lives, usually. Check out the new footage, filmed with the curious Inon close-focus wide angle bug-eye lens:

 

The footage turned out so well that I could use frame-grabs of the video as still photographs. This is rather rare, often the depth of field and the focus are enough for a video frame which is only seen to the eye for 1/30th of a second, but not enough for a photograph which a viewer looks at for seconds to minutes. Not in this case:

Previously…

I had written about this unusual fish before. The type specimen is from From Siokun Bay, Zamboanga peninsula, just across the ocean from where I live and dive. It seems the blog post had caught some online eyes, and my image of the mushroom coral pipefish now ranks number one in a Google Image search. This also is the case when I am logged out from my Google account; I am not sure if these search results are the same independent of location. In any case, nice to see that I have made the resident Dauin mushroom coral pipefish semi-famous.

Happy Fishes & Till Soon,

Klaus