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# Helen Asu's net found a fish lost for forty years
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/spinach-pipefish/
- Published: 2026-09-22T20:02:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-22T07:33:59.000Z
- Description: On the Sepik River, a fisherwoman's hand net did what four decades of expeditions could not: two spinach pipefish, last seen by science in 1985.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Global Good News, All stories

Helen Asu of Imbando village was doing what she does most mornings on the Sepik, working a hand net through the shallows for prawns, when two thin green fish came up in the mesh. She knew they were unusual and kept them. When researchers Jerrica Agebigo and Roger Maikei of the New Guinea Binatang Research Centre passed through on a two week canoe survey of the river, she showed them. "When Helen showed the fish to us, I immediately realised that we had found something very special," Agebigo, who also works with the Papua New Guinea University of Technology, told Mongabay. They were spinach pipefish, Microphis spinachioides, slender relatives of the seahorse that grow to about fifteen centimetres and live only in this river system. No scientist had recorded one since 1985\. Ichthyologist Gerald Allen, who knows the fishes of New Guinea better than anyone, confirmed the identification, and on 18 June 2026 the spinach pipefish came off the list of lost species.

It was the third of the Top 10 Most Wanted Lost Fishes to be found, a search run by the conservation groups SHOAL and Re:wild across 1,100 kilometres of the Sepik and beyond. Amanda Vincent, who chairs the IUCN group for seahorses, pipefish and seadragons, said the news made her heart sing. Mike Baltzer of SHOAL and Benjamin Barca of Re:wild both made the same point: the people who live on a river see it every day, and the best way to find a lost fish is to ask them. Helen Asu's catch means the pipefish can now be studied, its stretch of river cared for, and its name taught in the schools along the Sepik as something the village found first.

### Sources and links

Our short take: the full story is by Rhett Ayers Butler for Mongabay (10 September 2026), following a longer report by Spoorthy Raman (24 August 2026) and the SHOAL announcement. Photograph: a village on the Sepik River, Papua New Guinea, via Wikimedia Commons (licence on the file page); the pipefish itself has not yet been photographed for open use, so we show its river.

- [Indigenous fisherwoman finds lost spinach pipefish, Mongabay](https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/09/indigenous-fisherwoman-finds-lost-spinach-pipefish-not-seen-by-science-in-40-years/) Rhett Ayers Butler's report.
- [Found: spinach pipefish rediscovered after more than four decades, SHOAL](https://shoal.org/found-lost-fish-spinach-pipefish-rediscovered-after-more-than-four-decades/) The announcement of 24 August 2026, with photographs.