Velvet Ghost Pipefish Couple

A few week ago i posted about a white Ghost Pipefish, which i believed was a Halimeda Ghost Pipefish. I was already not sure at the time, but when revisiting the spot yesterday, i saw that i was wrong. It turned out, that it is a Velvet Ghost Pipefish – which is also a very rare fish. But even cooler is, that there are now two of them. The bigger one – the one that we have seen previously –was a male before. But when coming back this time it already turned into a female. Probably the arrival of the smaller male made it change sex. Ghost Pipefishes can change sex and turn into females. They can be recognizes by the pouch shaped pectoral fins in which they then keep their eggs. Unlike Seahorses and Pipefishes, where the male incubates the eggs, it is always the female Ghost Pipefish, that takes care of the unhatched eggs.