{"id":672931,"date":"2026-05-29T22:02:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T22:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/672931\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T22:02:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T22:02:14","slug":"scientists-just-discovered-the-snuffleupagus-of-the-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/672931\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists just discovered the Snuffleupagus of the sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past century, scientists have discovered all manner of weird and charismatic creatures on Australia\u2019s Great Barrier Reef. They\u2019ve found\u00a0shrimp<\/a>\u00a0that can see colors humans can’t imagine and\u00a0fish<\/a>\u00a0that can change their sex at will. But until recently, one species had eluded them: a strange and cryptic fish that bears a striking resemblance to a beloved Sesame Street character.<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0published this month in\u00a0Fish Biology, scientists announced the discovery of\u00a0Solenostomus snuffleupagus,\u00a0a new species of ghost pipefish named for its uncanny resemblance to\u00a0Mr. Snuffleupagus<\/a>, the woolly-mammoth-inspired character from Sesame Street. While the fish\u2019s name is certainly catchy, it\u2019s hardly the coolest thing about this species.<\/p>\n

An epic search<\/p>\n

Over twenty years ago,\u00a0David Harasti<\/a>, a marine scientist at Australia\u2019s Port Stephens Fisheries Institute, was scuba diving off the coast of Papua New Guinea when he saw a fish unlike any he\u2019d ever seen. Its snout was nearly as long as its body, and it was covered in long, flowing brown-orange filaments that made it nearly indistinguishable from a clump of algae.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After the dive, Harasti couldn’t get the fish off his mind. A few years later, he told a colleague that if the fuzzy fish turned out to be a new species, he wanted to name it after Mr. Snuffleupagus.<\/p>\n

\"Micro-CTreconstructions(lateralview)ofS.snuffleupagus\"<\/p>\n

The Solenostomus snuffleupagus are about 4\u20135 centimeters or the size of a golf tee. Kerryn Parkinson, Australian Museum<\/p>\n

\"Solenostomussnuffleupagus\"<\/p>\n

The Snuffleupagus ghost pipefish is covered in hair-like filaments that float like algae. Graham Short, Australian Museum<\/p>\n

Not long after, Harasti and that colleague, an ichthyologist named\u00a0Graham Short,\u00a0<\/a>who works for the California Academy of Sciences and the Australian Museum, set out in search of that fish. Harasti went back to Papua New Guinea five times while Short searched through a mountain of museum specimens. But it wasn\u2019t until 2021 that the pair made a breakthrough.<\/p>\n

Scuba divers on the Great Barrier Reef claimed to have seen several stubby, fuzzy fish swimming around. The researchers rushed to the reef and immediately started searching. On their first dive, they didn\u2019t find anything, but on their second, a pair of ghost pipefish revealed themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were just high-fiving, hugging underwater. I was actually screaming, I was so happy,\u201d recalls Short.<\/p>\n

Strange new fish<\/p>\n

After celebrating their find, the researchers collected the specimens and brought them back to the lab for further study. DNA analysis confirmed that the fish were, in fact, a new species of ghost pipefish, a family of fish that tends to resemble branches of coral or seaweed and typically use their tiny, straw-like mouths to suck up small crustaceans.\u00a0\u00a0They\u2019re closely related to true pipefish and seahorses, but they belong to a separate evolutionary lineage.<\/p>\n

And among the ghost pipefish,\u00a0Solenostomus snuffleupagus\u00a0is unique. They appear to be half the size of the average ghost pipefish, measuring just 4\u20135 centimeters, or the length of a golf tee. What\u2019s more, they may also eat other\u00a0fish. While performing CT scans of the specimens, the researchers found a small fish inside the stomach of one of the\u00a0Solenostomus snuffleupagus.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most notably, they\u2019re covered in hair-like filaments. After scanning the citizen science platform iNaturalist, the researchers realized their Snuffleupagus of the Sea had been\u00a0spotted across the South Pacific in recent years, showing up in Tonga, Papua New Guinea, and New Caledonia. And across their range, the fish varied in color from bright reds and purples to earthy oranges and browns.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey resemble floating tufts of algae,\u201d says\u00a0Short.\u00a0\u201cEven their movements resemble algae in the water. They hover near it, and if you’re not keenly aware, you\u2019ll swim right by it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Short continues to work on\u00a0discovering new species, and researchers say that the discovery of the Snuffleupagus fish bodes well for the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like finding Bigfoot except that he\u2019s teeny tiny,\u201d says\u00a0Kory Evans<\/a>, an ichthyologist and assistant professor at Rice University, who was not involved with the study. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be surprised if there were many more undescribed ghost pipefishes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the past century, scientists have discovered all manner of weird and charismatic creatures on Australia\u2019s Great Barrier…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[198673,293553,61521,177692,123840,79,293552,201561],"class_list":["post-672931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-australian-museum","tag-david-harasti","tag-great-barrier-reef","tag-new-species","tag-papua-new-guinea","tag-science","tag-solenostomus","tag-uncanny-resemblance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}