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Call it fate, luck or instinct, but as David Harasti dived past a coral wall off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2002, a tuft of red algae floating within a shadowy overhang caught his eye. And then it moved.
The fish scientist’s film camera flashed, snapping a photo of the oddity which began a quarter century-long quest. That search ended in the most extraordinary discovery of Harasti’s career – a new-to-science, ultra-rare and bizarre little beast named for the most mythic resident on Sesame Street, Mr Snuffleupagus.
“When I came back to Australia I processed the film camera photos, and I actually could see an eye,” Harasti, now principal research scientist at the Port Stephens Fisheries Institute, recalls of the 2002 encounter.
“That’s when I could make out it was actually an animal. And it didn’t exist in any of my books. I knew then it was a new species. We knew it was a type of ghost pipefish, but it was one that we’d never seen before.”
He searched the world for a formal specimen of the weird, weedy creature no longer than a matchstick.
“I went back to Papua New Guinea six times to go and find it; never saw it. I went to the Solomon Islands because I’d heard that someone had sighted it there, and I never saw it,” Harasti said.
“It was 20 years of me looking for this species all around the Indo-Pacific, and never seeing it again.”
Like an underwater Yowie, sporadic sightings of the pipefish cropped up in books and on blogs. Some saw it cloaked in orange, others in purple and green. But it was always shaggy.
All the while, Harasti searched, and the fuzzy phantom flitted between scientific promise and myth.
Part of his obsession was driven by the creature’s likeness to Sesame Street’s Mr Snuffleupagus, a galumphing yet elusive mammoth-like muppet introduced as Big Bird’s imaginary best friend.
“He was this rare, mythical creature that the humans didn’t believe in, if I remember correctly,” Harasti said of the character. “No one ever saw him.”
The fish’s likeness to Mr Snuffleupagus in both body and spirit also captured the imagination of Graham Short, a global expert in identifying new species of syngnathids, the family of fish which includes pipefish, seahorses and seadragons. He joined the drawn-out search.
Everything changed in 2020. Friends alerted Harasti that they’d spied the cryptic fish on the Great Barrier Reef, and sent pictures.
Harasti had a specimen collection licence and one last shot.
He and Short flew to Cairns and sped to where the fish had been spotted on Saxon Reef. Nothing. Then they dove at a second location.
There, 15 metres deep and within a coral nook festooned with red filamentous algae, the scientists found two of the shaggy pipefish: a male and female. Enough to describe a new species.
“Graham and I were hugging underwater. I kid you not. We were high-fiving, so excited that it was there,” Harasti said.
“This is something I’ve been searching for 20 years. It is the holy grail of the ghost pipefish world, it’s the rarest of the rare.”
Harasti collected the specimens and Short began the taxonomic work. He CT-scanned the tiny fish to scrutinise the structure of its bones, took measurements of fin rays and snout lengths, and analysed its genetics to distinguish the fish from other species.
The scientists formally announced the new species in the Journal of Fish Biology on Tuesday, naming it the hairy ghost pipefish and bestowing the scientific name Solenostomus snuffleupagus.
“I always said to Graham, if we can get these specimens, we’re going to name it after the Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street,” Harasti said. He approached Sesame Workshop, the non-profit production company behind the show, to seek their blessing.
“They were ecstatic about the whole thing,” Harasti said. “This hairy ghost pipefish is so rare, so elusive, it’s avoided us for so long. So everything matches: 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.”
The specimens had tiny fish in their stomachs, and the species probably also feeds on mysid shrimp and zooplankton. Its conservation status isn’t known but the discovery will be crucial to future conservation and protection efforts for pipefish – you can’t protect something without a name.
“But I’m pretty sure it’s more common than we think; it’s just so small and so well-camouflaged people probably just swim over it thinking it’s just a bit of algae and they don’t even realise what it is.”
Harasti and Short have both discovered several species new to science – Harasti even has a type of pipefish named after him. “This is, without a doubt, our best accomplishment.”
The pair’s next goal is to get on Sesame Street and meet Mr Snuffleupagus.
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