Twenty-three years ago, a marine biologist named Dave Harasti went out for a dive in Papua New Guinea. While he was in the water, a bright orange, hairy-looking fish swam past him, and he quickly snapped a photo.
The strange animal was unfamiliar to Harasti, and when he returned to the surface, he tried to figure out what kind of fish it was. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t figure it out.
“I … could never match it to any known species,” Harasti wrote on Instagram.
Harasti began to suspect that the fish he’d encountered was a species scientists hadn’t documented yet. He visited the dive spot where he’d seen the animal six more times to try to catch another glimpse, but didn’t see the orange fish again.
Harasti never stopped thinking about the mysterious animal he’d encountered. He wondered if he and the fish would ever cross paths again.
Then, in 2020, Harasti went on a dive in the Great Barrier Reef with his friend and fellow marine biologist, Graham Short. In the middle of their dive, a pair of familiar orange fish drifted past them. Harasti recognized them instantly — they looked exactly the same as the one he’d seen so many years before in Papua New Guinea.
After Harasti and Short examined the fish they’d found, their suspicions were confirmed: They’d found a new species. The animals’ unique hairlike tendrils made them stand out from other fish in their same genus.
Because Harasti and Short were the first to document the new species, they got to help decide what to name it. They decided on a name that highlighted the animal’s uncanny resemblance to a beloved TV character.
“With help from the Australian Museum, Graham and I named the species [Solenostomus snuffleupagus] because it looks uncannily like Mr. Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street: long snout, shaggy filaments, the whole vibe,” Harasti wrote on Instagram.
While Solenostomus snuffleupagus’ appearance is adorable and unique, it also serves an important purpose: camouflage. The fish look just like pieces of algae floating through the water, which helps them hide from predators. Their disguise also might be why it took so long for anyone to identify them — divers may have swum past them countless times and thought they were just pieces of seaweed.
Harasti and Short are overjoyed that they got to introduce this adorable new species to the world — and that they got to pick such a memorable name.
“This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever worked on,” Harasti wrote on Instagram.
