Endangered
River pipefish
Syngnathus watermeyeri
River pipefish is a ray-finned fish in the family Syngnathidae (order Syngnathiformes) — Syngnathus watermeyeri, recorded as Endangered and tied to South Africa.
Appearance
It can be readily distinguished from another southern African pipefish with that it shares its habitat, S. Temminckii, by its much shorter snout.
Range and habitat
The estuarine pipefish or river pipefish is a fish in the family Syngnathidae. It is endemic to South Africa and has been sporadically recorded in the estuarine portions of the Kariega, Kasouga, Bushmans, East Kleinemonde and West Kleinemonde rivers. The estuarine pipefish is most commonly found in beds of the eelgrass Zostera capensis.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
The estuarine pipefish was declared extinct in 1994, but was rediscovered in 2006 in areas where it had not been reported in over four decades. This pipefish is Endangered due to both natural and human threats to the brackish estuaries and local eelgrass beds in that it lives.
River pipefish is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on River pipefish, Wikidata item Q2685588. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
