Frogfish & anglers
Anglerfish: ambush predators that sit still, look like sponge, rubble or weed, and fish for what passes with a modified first dorsal spine. It is a small group, and the records in it are concentrated in the Lembeh Strait.
Four of them account for most sightings. The giant frogfish settles on a sponge and will hold the same one for weeks, which is why a guide can put a diver on the same animal on consecutive days. The painted and warty frogfish are sponge and rubble animals in the shallows. The hairy frogfish, a striate frogfish with the dermal appendages grown long, is an open-sand animal and the one most people ask for; it moves more than the others, and a guide who found it yesterday may not find it today.
The rest are small, cryptic or both. The freckled, spotfin and Randall's frogfish are separated on a single fin spot or ocellus and are easy to walk past. The three-spot frogfish carries the egg mass stuck to the male's own flank. The small frogfish that almost everyone here photographs was misidentified for decades and is now recorded as Nudiantennarius subteres.
Two of the entries are effectively single-destination animals. The psychedelic frogfish was described in 2009 and is recorded almost only from Ambon, where it sits in crevices and is sensitive to light. The sargassum frogfish rides floating weed instead of sitting on the bottom, so a sighting depends on what the current has carried in.
16 species
Photographed first, then commonest
Where they are recorded
How many of the 16 carry a record at each destination. A species usually carries several, so these do not add up to 16.
The other groups
All 971 species in one index, with filters for destination, rarity and hazard.