Meet the Newly Discovered Fuzzy Fish Species Named After Mr. Snuffleupagus From ‘Sesame Street’
The ghost pipefish’s scruffy appearance probably helps it look like floating algae, allowing it to blend in with its environment. Researchers had been on the hunt for this strange creature for years after first spotting one more than two decades ago
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In 2003, marine biologist David Harasti of Australia’s Port Stephens Fisheries Institute was scuba diving off the coast of Papua New Guinea when he spotted an unusual little fish. It was red, fuzzy and unlike anything he had ever seen before. He snapped a quick photo, and then the strange creature quickly disappeared.
That moment triggered a yearslong search for the elusive fish. Finally, in 2022, Harasti and ichthyologist Graham Short of the California Academy of Sciences and the Australian Museum collected two specimens at the Great Barrier Reef. After extensive analyses, the duo has determined that the fish belongs to a new species—named Solenostomus snuffleupagus after the shaggy “Sesame Street” character Mr. Snuffleupagus—which they describe in the August issue of the Journal of Fish Biology.
The fish’s resemblance to the beloved Muppet demonstrates “the awesome power of natural selection,” Milton Love, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute who wasn’t involved in the study, tells the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Sheena Goodyear. “All of the morphological features that we find endearing are of some value to the animal.”
S. snuffleupagus is a roughly 1.5-inch-long species of ghost pipefish, a relative of seahorses and true pipefish. They’re known as masters of disguise, easily blending in with their surroundings. That’s probably the evolutionary function of S. snuffleupagus’ scruffy look.
“They resemble floating tufts of algae,” Short tells National Geographic’s Annie Roth. “Even their movements resemble algae in the water. They hover near it, and if you’re not keenly aware, you’ll swim right by it.”
To determine whether the strange fuzzy fish was a previously undescribed species, Short and Harasti took detailed measurements of the collected specimens’ bodily features, including internal ones thanks to CT scans, and analyzed their DNA. Besides its unique appearance, S. snuffleupagus has more vertebrae than its kin, analyses revealed. Moreover, the genetic examination hinted that the species split off from other ghost pipefish around 18 million years ago.
The CT scans also showed remains of smaller fishes in the stomach of one specimen, marking the first documented instance of fish-eating in any member of the Solenostomus genus. S. snuffleupagus probably also feasts on small crustaceans, such as mysid shrimps and zooplankton, like its close cousins, according to the researchers.
“For such a cute little thing, it’s actually a predator,” Short tells Scientific American’s Meghan Bartels.
Did you know? Parental care
Seahorses and true pipefishes are famous for paternal care, where males carry and give birth to offspring. But their relatives, ghost pipefish, don’t do this. Females hold the eggs using modified pelvic fins as a “brood pouch” until they hatch.
Harasti always knew that he wanted to name the species after the “Sesame Street” character, not just because of its physical resemblance, but also because of its elusive nature. During Mr. Snuffleupagus’ first 14 years on the show, only Big Bird saw him, so other characters thought their feathered friend was imagining the large, fuzzy creature.
“He was this rare, mythical creature that the humans didn’t believe in,” Harasti tells Angus Dalton at the Sydney Morning Herald. The character matches the fish in both looks and spirit. “It’s got the hairy filaments, it’s got the long snout, it’s just a really good replica of Mr. Snuffleupagus underwater, and it has that same mystique about it as well,” he adds.
Harasti even reached out to the Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces the show, and received their “ecstatic” blessing, reports the outlet.
Additionally, thanks to observations posted on the citizen science platform iNaturalist, the researchers determined that the fish likely lives all over the southwest Pacific Ocean. Beyond Australia and Papua New Guinea, S. snuffleupagus has been sighted near Fiji, New Caledonia and Tonga. The animals can also take on different colorations, including oranges and purples.
The work underscores the ecological importance of coral habitats as places with cryptic creatures, Short and Harasti write in the paper. Even places as well-surveyed as the Great Barrier Reef can be home to undescribed species.
Discovering S. snuffleupagus is “like finding Bigfoot, except that he’s teeny tiny,” says Kory Evans, an ichthyologist at Rice University who was not involved with the study, to National Geographic. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were many more undescribed ghost pipefishes.”
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