Pipefish

Pipefish are seahorses that never sat up. The body is a long, stiff, pencil-thin tube of bony rings, the snout is a fused tube with a tiny mouth at the tip, and propulsion comes almost entirely from a small transparent dorsal fin rippling in the middle of the back. Colours are camouflage colours: olive, brown, grey-green, sometimes with pale saddles or fine bars, matching seagrass blades and drift algae almost exactly. Three species account for most Maltese sightings. The broadnosed pipefish, Syngnathus typhle, is the seagrass specialist and holds itself vertically among blades with a deep, flattened snout. The greater pipefish, Syngnathus acus, is the largest, up to about 45 to 50 cm, with a distinct bump on the head in front of the eyes. The black-striped pipefish, Syngnathus abaster, is a small, slim species of sheltered shallow water. The worm pipefishes of the genus Nerophis also occur.

Around Malta, Gozo and Comino they live in the top 20 metres over Posidonia meadows, mixed algae, dead seagrass matte and quiet rubble bottoms in sheltered bays. They are far commoner than seahorses but almost invisible because they lie parallel to the blades and drift with the surge. The broadnosed pipefish was once very common in Maltese coastal bays and has declined noticeably in the last decade, enough that the Malta Aquaculture Research Centre bred it in captivity between 2011 and 2015 and released young into quiet local bays.

Like seahorses, the males do the carrying: eggs are held in a pouch or a glued strip on the underside of the tail until the young hatch out as miniature versions of the adults.