Long-snouted Seahorse

A small fish of temperate eastern Atlantic waters, found from the United Kingdom and Netherlands south to Morocco, including the Canary Islands, Azores and Madeira, as well as the Mediterranean Sea and Italian coast. It has a slender body, a long snout and a prehensile tail, with dermal filaments on its head and dorsal ridge that can be simple or branched, and coloring from dark green to brown or yellow, usually flecked with white. It reaches a maximum of about 21.5 centimeters, averaging closer to 12, and lives in shallow coastal water one to twenty meters deep, favoring seagrass meadows or mixed habitats of sand, rock and algae.