A small rubble moray, boldly ringed when young and progressively darker with age.
A moray to about 70 cm, though most animals seen are half that. Young fish are white to pale cream with twenty or more sharply defined dark rings running right around the body, and they are among the more strikingly marked eels on shallow rubble. With growth the pale ground darkens and the rings broaden and run together, so that a large animal is close to uniform brown with the pattern showing only faintly on the belly. Two eels of the same species at different sizes therefore look nothing alike.
The snout is short and blunt and the teeth are low and rounded rather than pointed, which goes with a diet of crabs and other hard-shelled animals crushed rather than gripped. It works the interior of rubble beds and dead coral in very shallow water, mostly above about 15 m, and is out of sight by day. Sightings come almost entirely from night dives, when the head appears at the mouth of a hole or the whole animal moves over the rubble surface.
Recorded across the Indo-Pacific. On muck sites it belongs to the shallow rubble margin rather than to open sand, and the pale juveniles are found more often than the adults because they use the smaller and more accessible gaps.
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.
