Boldly banded eel that hunts openly across sand, easily mistaken for a sea snake.
A slender ophichthid to about 97 cm, cream to white with 25 to 30 broad dark bands that in most individuals encircle the body completely. The head is small and pointed, the eye set well forward, and the tail ends in a hard, blunt point used for burrowing backwards rather than in a fin. Some individuals carry additional dark spots in the pale interspaces. The banding is a close match for the sea snake Laticauda colubrina, and the resemblance is the standard textbook example of a harmless animal converging on a venomous one; a sea snake surfaces to breathe and has a flattened paddle tail, an eel does neither.
Unusual among snake eels in hunting in the open rather than lying buried, working across sand and silt in daylight as well as at night, nosing into the substrate after small fish and crustaceans. It moves continuously and rarely holds still, which is the practical problem in photographing one. Recorded from the shallows to about 30 m across the Indo-Pacific and the Red Sea. When alarmed it drives its tail into the sand and disappears backwards in a few seconds.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.