Question: if its a terrible swimmer, roughly how long does it take for them to swim a mile??

Snake Pipefish answered on 20 Nov 2017:

haha I don’t really know. Let’s see, if it’s swimming properly (not being carried around by currents) then my guess is that they swim about 5 meters per minute, which means that a snake pipefish would take around 360 minutes to swim 1600 metres (1 mile). That’s over 5 hours, which sounds absolutely ridiculous. I don’t think anyone has ever measured their speed.
The thing is, pipefishes and seahorses rely on crypsis for survival, which means that most of the time they just stand still to look like coral or seagrasses, so their predators don’t find them. They also move very slowly towards prey, such as small shrimp, so the prey don’t realise that what’s approaching them slowly is not a dead piece of algae but in fact a predator. And because they don’t need to swim quickly to feed nor to escape predators, they have rather small fins. Although they may be a bit faster than 5hrs per miles, that just sounds a bit too slow!