Pale moray marked with irregular black blotches and a yellow-green head.
A moray reaching about 80 cm, pale cream to greenish yellow, marked along the body with a row of large irregular black blotches that become smaller and more crowded towards the tail. The head is yellow-green and finely dark-speckled, the snout long and the teeth are conspicuously long and pointed, so an open mouth shows a full set — this and the blotch pattern separate it from the similarly sized Gymnothorax favagineus, which is covered in a dense honeycomb of dark spots rather than a line of blotches.
Widely distributed across the Indo-Pacific and one of the morays most often seen out of a hole on soft bottoms, hunting across open sand at night and sometimes in late afternoon. By day it lies in rubble, under debris or in a burrow with only the head showing. Recorded from about 2 to 45 m. Nothing about a moray’s open jaw is aggression — it is how the animal breathes — but this species is longer in the tooth than most and will move to reposition itself rather than withdraw, so it is worth watching where the body is as well as the head.
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.