After more than four decades missing from scientific records, one of the world’s most wanted lost freshwater fishes has been rediscovered in Papua New Guinea’s Sepik River. The Spinach Pipefish (Microphis spinachioides) is a small, slender relative of seahorses, known only from the Sepik River system. It had not been scientifically recorded since surveys in the 1980s, and so little was known about it that it was impossible to know if it still existed without searching its range in one of the great river systems of the Asia-Pacific.
The Sepik runs for more than 1,100 kilometres through northern Papua New Guinea, feeding a vast landscape of tributaries, floodplain lakes, forests and wetlands. Much of it remains free-flowing and intact, and it supports an extraordinary freshwater biodiversity, along with the communities whose lives are intertwined with the river.
